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Art, born of the desire to represent the world – or, at least, to try to interpret it – has constantly butted up against the impossibility of achieving this utopian figurative project. From this irreconcilable tension between reality and any attempt to reconstruct it through imitation was born a multitude of strategies, forms, and means that have made art heterogeneous and in constant mutation. Indeed, all artists seem to justify their practices on the basis of their own ability to abstract a specific vision of the world. In this sense, abstraction as an art movement champions the desire to return to the very essence of art.

The official advent of abstract art in the West occurred at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian artist whose subversive pictorial practice earned him exile. Firmly thumbing his nose at the attempts over millennia to reconstruct the visible world through mimetic imitation, Kandinsky advocated an internalized practice of painting guided both by the material, finally freed from the constraints of representation, and by the artist’s subjectivity.

So, in the history of Western art, abstraction was generally defined in opposition to pictorial realism – and, incidentally, to figuration – by the use of geometrical shapes, colour fields, and deconstructed lines to challenge the monopoly of representation. Creation itself was freed from aesthetic and institutional injunctions, consolidating critical foundations lain by avant-gardes. Autonomy of form, colour freed from the age-old grip of drawing, deconstruction of perspective, doing away with the hierarchy of planes, a marked penchant for self-criticism and self-referentiality, granting agency to the material and the support: it’s no surprise to see abstraction so vigorously (and variously) resurgent today. Artists’ current passion for neomaterialist theories and the expressiveness of matter is, in this sense, highly eloquent.

Indeed, recent years have seen renewed interest in abstraction, recharged with activist energy and an engagement certainly not present at its inception, when it was confined to a meta-critique of the figurative stance of Western art. Although such critical introspection is still as fundamentally relevant as ever to the theorization of art, today the reclaimed concept of abstract art embraces production by a highly diversified art community. Why the resurgence in interest? Why does abstraction still appeal to artists? What “freedom” does it generate in response to the narrative constraint typical of figuration? Do formalist practices have a place in today’s art? Or does the political power of abstraction reside precisely in the dissolution of the figurative? Do we always have to approach abstraction as a dualism with its counterpart, figuration? Must abstraction, as the art historian Clement Greenberg and his emulators proposed, be defined still and only by the irreducibility of art to its means? Or must abstract art be political? Hasn’t it always been? Esse invites authors to engage with these questions and other related issues through an analysis of contemporary or recent art practices.