If you are considering this book apart from the painting exhibition it supports, then you are viewing only realistic representations. The abstract-realist or Magnadott paintings oscillate in a space between representation and abstraction. As the viewer moves through the space of the artwork moments of clarity will juxtapose with periods of obfuscation. I believe this graphic style parallels the moments of clarity and periods of obfuscation that the depicted souls have experienced in their journeys. In this exhibition abstraction is employed in the service of and in a strange symbiosis with representation. I feel compelled, however, to mention briefly the importance of abstraction in our lives. Abstraction is a luxury, but an essential one.

For a while now I have been giving a slide lecture: Strange Pixels: the art history of the dot— from the big bang to me. After a recent talk a Chicano artist said to me - not quite in words this direct, but I think this was his point: “You know, I still don’t like your work, but I understand it better now.”

It became clear that if one has a political agenda, or needs to give voice to a marginalized culture, or preserve a heritage teetering on extinction, then abstraction is an unaffordable luxury. To be sure, ever since Modernism, ever since Diego Rivera made the anachronistic journey from abstraction to representation, representation doesn’t just mean photorealistic pretty pictures. Representation today is informed by modernism, by abstraction. But abstraction itself is a luxury an agenda cannot afford. In the heyday of modernism white men exhibited amazing explorations of pure fundamentals in white cubes. In the postmodern period, a diverse range of artists have exhibited works in a diverse range of settings.

In the beginning of the 20th century, two Russians, Waz Kandinsky and Kaz Malevich culminated years of European exploration with that final leap into pure abstraction. Waz explored expressive abstraction and Kaz geometric abstraction. But then the intelligentsia required Social Realism and abstraction was out. Waz was out of the country. Kaz was in the country, but very out of favor. After incarceration and interrogation his late works appear as Galilean-like recantations of his vision of abstraction.

Today we speak of Visual Culture as artists employ popular media to a wide range of cultural ends. To me the operational term is Visual Clutter. We watch zillion dollar movies by Schwarzenegger, Spielberg and ILM, then careen through the four level interchange in a blur of head- and taillights while talking on a cell phone only to finally reach home for a late news assault of rapes and murders.

I believe the cure for Visual Clutter is abstraction. And the best way to absorb its power is in the oft-derided white cube. The Rothko chapel stands as a seminal presentation of abstraction as the gateway to the spiritual.

Once upon a time, Kaz said, ”Color and texture in painting are ends in themselves. They are the essence of painting, but this essence has always been destroyed by the subject. And if the masters of the Renaissance had discovered the surface of painting, it would have been much more exalted and valuable than any Madonna or Giaconda.”

Through abstraction we explore beyond the contemporary, to discover the universal.