Point Twenty
Jerry Saltz left it blank. I've been trying to fill it in for years.
Rangoli in Permanence · Acrylic on canvas · 60 × 60 in · 2026 The center is almost a painting within a painting. Rangoli fades. This surface remembers.
Jerry Saltz ends his Abstract Manifesto with an empty seat.
The manifesto runs nineteen numbered points — extraordinary, generous, hard-won points about what abstraction is and what it does. Then point twenty: "I've left it out, because I want to hear your opinion. What else does abstraction do that's special?"
Look at the painting above before you read further. Don't name it. Don't explain it to yourself. Just notice what happens in your body — where your eye goes, what your chest does, whether you feel enclosed or released. Hold that.
Now read on.
I've been living inside that question for six years as a full-time painter. Before that, I built companies. Before that, I grew up in New Delhi in a house full of art criticism — my father championed Souza, Husain, Swaminathan — the great Indian modernists — at a time when the Indian art world was finding its own abstract language. So the question has followed me across continents and careers and media.
What does abstraction do that's special?
I think I finally have an answer. But to give it, I have to first explain where I'm standing when I ask the question. Because it matters enormously whether you approach abstraction from the outside, trying to get in — or from the inside, trying to find words for what you already know.
Where Saltz Stands. Where I Stand.
Saltz is one of the great critics of our time. His manifesto is an act of translation — generous, hard-won, and written by someone who had to fight his way toward understanding abstraction. He says so himself: it can take thirty years to understand why an all-white Ryman or a pencil grid by Agnes Martin is art. His nineteen points are the fruit of that struggle. They're written toward abstraction, from a position of hard-earned arrival.
I come from the other direction entirely.
I am an abstract painter. I don't translate abstraction — I make it. And the problem I face is not how to explain it to someone on the outside. The problem I face is this: I have 252 paintings in my catalog. Each one arrived through a different kind of listening, a different surrender, a different conversation between my hand and the surface. And I have almost no language — none that satisfies me — to describe what distinguishes one from another in a way that is true to the experience of making or encountering them.
Art historical lineage gets me partway. Formal description gets me a little further. Emotional response gets me closest — but then slips into subjectivity so total it becomes useless. I can say this painting is charged and anxious and that one is patient and inevitable — and both descriptions will be true and neither will be adequate.
Saltz's manifesto is the view from the foothills, looking up at the mountain with awe and hard-won respect.
I'm trying to draw a map from the summit. Not because I've arrived at some higher understanding — but because I'm already there, already inside the territory, and I need coordinates.
The Problem I Keep Running Into
Abstract painting has always demanded a phenomenology of encounter rather than a semiotics of representation. We have never built one.
The critical language available for abstract work — emotional response, art historical lineage, formal description — remains downstream of what a painting actually does to the body and mind of the person standing in front of it. We describe effects. We have no grammar for causes.
This is the double language problem. And it has two layers.
The first layer is the layer Saltz is pointing at when he says abstraction "circumvents language and sidesteps naming or mere description." He's right. Abstract painting resists the semiotic move — the move where you identify what something stands for, what it represents, and then feel you've understood it. You can't do that with a great abstraction. There's nothing to decode. The painting is the thing, not a picture of the thing.
But here's the second layer, the one that I think goes unacknowledged: even within the world of abstraction — even among people who love it, who make it, who have fully given up on the decoding move — we still don't have language for the differences between one painting and another. We have categories (gestural, geometric, lyrical, hard-edge) that describe surface appearances. We have art historical labels (Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Process Art) that describe movements and periods. But we don't have a grammar for what a painting asks of the body of the person standing in front of it. We don't have a vocabulary for the phenomenological distinctions — the difference between a painting that encloses you and one that opens you, between one that demands stillness and one that generates motion in the viewer, between one that operates through accumulation and one that operates through reduction.
We describe what we see. We have almost no words for what we undergo.
Go back to Rangoli in Permanence for a moment. What you felt when you first looked — before you had language for it — that was the encounter. What you would say if someone asked you to describe it: that is the deflection. The gap between those two things is exactly what I'm trying to close.
Why This Matters for Collectors. Why It Matters for Artists.
When someone walks into a gallery and stands in front of an abstract painting they respond to — viscerally, unexpectedly, without understanding why — and someone asks them what do you like about it, they reach for the only language available: I love the colors. It makes me feel calm. It reminds me of the ocean.
These are not wrong answers. But they are deflections. They're the person reaching for representational language — for semiotics — because no one has given them another tool. The painting did something to them that they have no words for. So they describe the closest thing they can name.
And this is where the collector loses the painting. Not because they don't feel it — they feel it completely. But because without language adequate to the encounter, they can't hold onto what happened. They can't compare it to the next painting they encounter. They can't build the internal vocabulary that would let them understand their own responses over time and develop real taste — not borrowed taste, not art-world-approved taste, but their own.
For artists, the problem runs even deeper. When I finish a painting that came through a process of pure surrender — where I followed the gravity of the paint, let the thread find its own line, stopped before the thing became something I intended — I have almost no way to distinguish that painting, in words, from one that came through a different kind of surrender. Both involved letting go. But they let go of different things. They released into different territories. The phenomenology of making them was completely distinct. And if I can't name that distinction, I can't track my own practice. I can't understand what I'm building over years.
Language isn't just for communication. It's for thinking. And without adequate language, certain thoughts remain impossible.
What I've Been Building
For the past two years, I've been developing what I call a Taxonomy of Abstraction — not a classification system, but a navigational one. Six dimensions that describe not what a painting looks like, but what it does: to the body, to perception, to the encounter. Texture as physical and conceptual weight. Form as the movement or stillness the work generates in the viewer. Colour range as emotional temperature and range. These are not art historical categories. They're phenomenological ones.
The underlying argument is this: abstract painting has a double language problem, and the solution is not to describe paintings better. The solution is to describe encounters better. To build a grammar not for objects but for the meeting between an object and a consciousness.
Saltz gets close to this when he writes that abstraction "exists in the interstices between the ideal and the real, symbol and substance, the optic and the haptic." That word — haptic — is doing a lot of work. It's gesturing toward the body. Toward the fact that a great abstraction is not just seen, it's felt in the proprioceptive sense — you feel your own posture shift, your breathing change, something in your chest either open or contract.
But then the manifesto moves on. The insight arrives and doesn't stay.
I want to stay there. I want to build a language that starts there and doesn't leave.
What I Think Point Twenty Is
Saltz asks: What else does abstraction do that's special?
Here is my answer, after six years of making it and a lifetime of living around it:
Abstraction is the only art form that makes the act of encountering visible. It has no subject matter to hide behind. There is no narrative to follow, no figure to identify with, no landscape to recognize. There is only the encounter itself — the meeting of a consciousness with a surface — stripped of everything that would make it deniable.
This is why it unsettles people. Not because it's difficult. But because it's exposing. Standing in front of a great abstraction, you cannot pretend to understand something you don't feel. You cannot perform a reading. You are left with only what actually happens to you — and most of us are not accustomed to that exposure.
And this is why the language problem is not merely aesthetic or academic. It's existential. Without words for what happens in that encounter, people flee from it — back into representation, back into narrative, back into art that gives them something to say about it. The language failure is part of why abstraction remains, for so many intelligent and sensitive people, inaccessible.
Building that language — from the inside, from the practice, from the making — is not a critical project. It's a survival project. It's how painting stays alive.
That's what I've been doing in the studio. That's what I'm trying to build.
Point twenty is not empty. We just haven't written it yet.
Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona. His work is represented by Jarrow & Goodman in Los Angeles. His forthcoming book The Shape of Seeing is published by American Real Publishing. More at rituart.com.
Note · Jerry Saltz's "Abstract Manifesto in Twenty Parts" was originally published in New York Magazine. A widely circulated PDF can be found at photonlab.com. An archived version also lives at artand.tumblr.com.
