The best abstract painting seems “nothing short of miraculous,” the French poet and critic Yves Bonnefoy remarks, for it satisfies “the desire for the immediate”(1)—for pure sensation, uncorrupted by consciousness of meaning. Bonnefoy thinks that the experience of immediacy—of pure presence, directly given, with no need for language to shape it into comprehension (and mute its impact)--is an illusion. It is a private myth—magical thinking--that has been given social credibility, ironically by the need to escape social pressure. The “conventional readings of the world” are not so much defeated as complicated by the mirage of immediacy, he argues. They need a codicil explaining why the belief in immediacy must be abandoned, however reluctantly. Bonnefoy doesn’t want to wait for the feeling of immediacy to fade away, as it will inevitably do because it is inherently transient, but discredits it as a subjective indulgence. Looking at it from the disillusioning point of view of everyday... READ MORE