The Abstract Question

With the False Abstracts series, I make an unusual gesture. I invite  professionally trained faux marble painters—masters of a discipline typically relegated to the decorative arts—to contribute their finest work to a set of my signature square panels. The brief is simple and sincere: paint as you always do. No irony. No conceptual subversion. Just your best interpretation of marble.

And yet, the outcome is anything but conventional. Because faux marble, by its very nature, is never a direct copy of an actual stone. It is always an interpretation—a stylized reimagining of natural mineral patterns using painterly means. These artisans do not reproduce known slabs; they invent their own plausible fictions of stone. In doing so, they engage in a visual practice that is already close—perhaps uncannily so—to what we traditionally call abstract painting.

This becomes the hinge of the project: the realization that faux marble is, in essence, abstract painting in disguise. The decorator’s task is to simulate the effects of geological formation—layering, veining, sedimentation—through a sequence of controlled gestures. Using feathers, sponges, glazes, brushes, and stippling techniques, the artisan constructs a surface that reads as both natural and artificial, random yet composed. The goal is never to copy, but to evoke the logic of stone.

And in that evocation lies a practice that mirrors the language of modernist abstraction. The artisan, like the abstract painter, composes with intuition, rhythm, touch, even with personal style. They layer transparencies to create depth. They disrupt uniformity with sudden shifts. They pursue a balance between chaos and control. The difference lies not so much in form as in culture: one tradition is labeled “craft,” the other “art.”

What I want False Abstracts to reveal is how thin that distinction really is. Once we move past the idea of mimicry, faux marble painting becomes abstract painting—but it arrives there through a different lineage. There is no manifesto, no metaphysics, no tortured search for authenticity. This is abstraction without the myth of the heroic artist. It is abstraction drained of ego.

And paradoxically, that may be what makes it so compelling. I'm not interested in borrowing the aesthetic of faux marble for contemporary art. Instead, I invite the actual practitioners of that tradition to step into an art context without altering their practice. They are not asked to mimic or mock abstraction—they are asked to take themselves seriously. They simply work at a level where the outcome demands aesthetic attention—where it transcends function and becomes form in itself. These paintings don’t pretend to be abstract art. They simply are, by virtue of what they do and how they do it. The “false” in False Abstracts refers not to deception, but to dislocation: a shift in context that reveals the arbitrary borders we draw between ornament and expression, between the decorative and the autonomous.

The goal is not to propel faux marble into the canon of high abstraction, to place these works in competition with painters like Richter, Frankenthaler, or Zao Wou-Ki. Nor is it about challenging the status of abstract painting or the weight of ideology it carries. Instead, I want to shift the focus to what matters most: the quality of abstraction achieved—its depth, coherence, inventiveness, and presence. These panels invite us to ask a fundamental question: are we willing to look at the quality of abstraction before anything else—before authorship, context, or category? Can we suspend, even for a moment, the institutional reflex to classify, and simply see what is there?

If so, then abstraction may not be the exclusive invention of modernism. It is a visual language that was already being spoken fluently outside the gallery walls—and indeed, long before abstract art was ever formally conceived. And in acknowledging this, I believe we may begin to ask the right questions.