Sublime | Abstract Painting | Philosophy
Lyotard, J.-F, 1982. ‘Presenting the unpresentable: The sublime’, Artforum, [online]. Available at: https://www.artforum.com/features/presenting-the-unpresentable-the-sublime-208373/ [Accessed 18 October 2024].
Jean-François Lyotard explores the concept of the sublime, arguing that absolutes—such as the universe, humanity, and moral ideals—cannot be directly represented because any form of representation inherently contextualizes and relativizes them. Drawing on Kantian philosophy, Lyotard introduces the idea of “negative representation” or the abstract as a means to acknowledge the absolute indirectly. Since 1910, abstract painting has embodied this approach by making elusive allusions to the invisible within the visible, thereby invoking the sublime rather than the beautiful. The sublime emerges not from straightforward gratification but from the strenuous effort to represent the unrepresentable. Even when this attempt fails and induces discomfort, a pure form of gratification arises from the tension, which is the essence of the sublime.
“The sublime is not simple gratification but the gratification of effort. It is impossible to represent the absolute, which is ungratifying; but one knows that one has to, that the faculty of feeling or imagining is called upon to make the perceptible represent the ineffable – and even if this fails, and even if that causes suffering, a pure gratification will emerge from the tension” (Lyotard, J.-F, 1982, para. 12).
In creating my graduation project, I initially sought to depict humanity through six panels of Abstract Expressionist paintings. The complexity of human nature made me realize that figurative elements—such as faces or bodies—could not fully convey the absoluteness of the human experience. Embracing Lyotard’s notion of the sublime, I turned to abstract expression to indirectly allude to this complexity. As I developed these paintings, I recognized that despite using intricate brushstrokes and emotional depth, the works remained representations rather than embodiments of humanity itself. This alignment with Lyotard’s ideas highlighted the inherent tension in attempting to depict the unrepresentable, embodying the sublime through the very act of striving to capture the absolute. Consequently, my artistic focus shifted towards exploring the intersection of abstract expression and the sublime, deepening my engagement with themes of existence and the ineffable aspects of human experience.
DE TANG 
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