The Transfiguration of the Real in Abstract Painting

This article challenges a series of assumptions associated with abstract painting, arguing that this type of art makes one understand a visual manifestation which does no longer refer to the visible world only, but also to an intelligible world, accessible to the senses. Non-figurative painting abandons the reproduction of the visible, in order to present us with the invisible, and in order to account for this phenomenon the author elaborates three types of philosophical decision to interpret the mode of being of the image. The comprehension of this original experience of abstract art is then compared to the relations between the visible and the invisible, as Christian theology delineates them. Christianity is defined first by the experience of the figuration of God, by His embodiment, which actually enables one to conceive of certain images, such as the icon of the Orthodox liturgy, but at the same time it also bestows, for the first time, an incredible status to the disappearance of the visible divine body, when it returns to the invisible, while remaining present in the visible.