Some say abstract art is non-representational—that it avoids visual reality and relies on color, shape, form, and gesture to trigger emotion or thought. I see it differently. Abstraction does not reject reality; it reframes it. It is a change of optics, not a disappearance of the world.
Take, for example, this video of goldfinches perched on swaying thistles. At first glance, does it not resemble an abstract painting? Rhythms, repetitions, subtle chromatic tensions, forms dissolving into movement. From there, one could push the abstraction further with the slightest shifts in shape or color—without betraying reality, only rephrasing it.
This idea is hardly new. From Cézanne’s insistence on treating nature through cylinder, sphere, and cone, to Kandinsky’s claim that abstraction reveals inner necessity rather than surface likeness, many artists and thinkers have argued that abstraction sharpens perception instead of diluting it. Even in cognitive science, perception is understood as an active construction, not a passive recording of facts.
Abstraction starts precisely there: with attention. Not with denial, not with decoration, but with the recognition that reality is already structured, already abstract, long before the artist intervenes.