How can you observe the following?
Formal picture composition pertaining to, e.g. color, space, balance, etc. as a contributing element of picture meaning is common knowledge, and is not of primary concern in this essay.
The painting, Traces of a
Dialog (angel) consists of a painterly and graphical
interplay of two key picture elements:
Most important it that the work be observed as a poetic whole. and that the observer enters upon the picture with his/her personal emotion and observation - not associations or projections. The observer can discriminate two kinds of space. One is created using the thatch work of red, eometrical lines, the other is out of transparent, and superimposed blue colored layers.
The difference of these two spatial forms - the geometric and the painterly - produces that, what the observer can then perceive as depth: a stage on which the white brush stroke enters from the top right. See is you can observe this!
In essence, one large, white brush stroke determines the dominant movement in an infinite field of depth. The while brush stroke is strong in contrast to the backdrop of an otherwise cool, "inactive" picture space. The space becomes literally filled with its white light, in this case, also a metapher on "how" an angel might "touch" a person.
Discrimination of the fixed space element from an active movement-in-space determines a further dimention of depth within the picture. At this point, the picture's situation then takes on the poetic character of metaphor: An angel is like a while brush stroke, the human heart like a space in which it moves.
A romantic projection of an angel can be found nowhere in the picture. Symbolism of an angel or its mythology is not intended. The play on the angel theme lies in the interplay or "how" of the picture´s components. Observed differences stand in a marked relationship to personal selection of the observer by which a difference is observed. In such a way, the picture´s meaning becomes timeless.Meaning surrounding the so called angel emerges in an autopoietic way. The observer selects ever discriminently, different form elements within the picture to differentiate meaning over and again!
In other words, meaning originates as something new over and beyond the mere content of the forms by which the observer differentiated the particular meaning in the first place. For example: The white brush stroke relates no meaning about an angel when painted by itself or in the absence of context. In this case, it would simply stay the dynamicly painted white line, with all the characteristics that it is. The difference of the white brush stroke to the field of depth in which it operates relates a conclusive meaning about a momentary "how" of an angel to the observer.
The more forms the observer is able to selectively discriminate within the picture, the more he/she can continue to differentiate towards "how" a so called angel might be (see methapher). In affect, the angel becomes reality in the observer in the "how", and through differentiating, by which the meaning becomes manifest for any practiced observer. An alienating element is the hardly dicernable shoe tread, to the bottom right of the white line: At first glance it doesn´t seem to fit in the picture. It seems to startle, like the excitement of a fresh track on new fallen snow. Its symbolism is unmistakebly clear: Like a track, it is that element which remains to make known, the presence of an unforeseeable being and/or action.
Recommended reading on observation, discrimination and differentiation of art meaning: