Paradigmatic pictures. Radical abstract painting as a philosophy of the image

This article starts from the thesis that radical painterly abstraction from the 1960s and 1970s is not only an important part of high modernism and postmodernism but also helps us to better understand the ontological position of the concept of the image and pictorial representation in general. Only when we separate the image from its instrumental function, either as an art object or as a means of communication, can we understand how images differ from reality and what we can actually see in them or through them. In order to do this, we give pictures of analytical painting and minimalism an exemplary or prototypical status and call them “paradigmatic pictures”, while we call all other pictures, including those pertaining to the tradition of 20th-century radical abstraction when viewed within an artistic context, “instrumental pictures”. We will first place our discussion in the context established by Filiberto Menna’s concept of the «analytical line of modern art», and then expand it with insights from the contemporary phenomenology of the image. Referring to the theses of the German philosophers Dieter Mersch, Lambert Wiesing, and Martin Seel, we will single out three of their key observations that explain the fundamental determinants of all images: «pictures show and show themselves», «pictures are visible because they are exclusively visible», and «pictures foreground their own appearing». Although these authors did not deal with radical abstract painting in the narrower sense, we aim to demonstrate that the mentioned paradigms are discernible especially in the works of minimalism and analytical painting and that the pronounced self-referentiality of these artistic practices has a theoretical potential that should be given a status different from disciplines that deal with art through concepts of form, style, or periodization.