The Agreement We Suspend
On abstract painting, shared reality, and what remains when the contract breaks
Bands pf Tension, 6×6 ft and the artist Ritu Raj, with the painting
There is a term used in consciousness studies and cultural theory — reality agreement — that I have been sitting with lately. It refers to the implicit contract we make with one another about what is real. Not reality as a physical fact, but reality as a shared story. Time as a line moving forward. Success as a thing that can be accumulated. A nation as something more than a coordination fiction. These are not lies, exactly. They are agreements — vast, ancient, mostly invisible — that organize our perception and make collective life possible.
What interests me is not whether these agreements are true. It's what happens at their edges. What happens when someone refuses to sign.
Abstract painting, at its best, is that refusal.
The Double Suspension
A representational painting asks you to agree twice. First, that marks on a surface can stand in for a person, a tree, a bowl of fruit. Second, that the scene depicted carries some kind of meaning — narrative, beauty, significance. Most viewers accept both agreements so quickly they don't notice either one. The contract is invisible because it's been signed ten thousand times before.
An abstract painting withdraws the first offer entirely. There is no tree. There is no fruit. And without the first agreement, the second becomes strange — what does it mean to find meaning in something that refuses to represent anything?
This is what I have called the double language problem: we lack representational language for the paintings themselves, and we lack representational language for the desire to encounter them. We stand in front of an abstract work and feel something we have no ready words for, which means we've been handed a private reality with no shared translation.
The painting has dissolved the agreement. And now we have to find out what's underneath.
What the Taxonomy Is Really Doing
When I developed the Taxonomy of Abstraction — now across eight dimensions, including Texture, Form, Colour Range, Semantic Intent, and Sentiment — I kept telling myself it was a navigational instrument. A way to help viewers find their way into work they might otherwise find opaque.
That's true. But there's something deeper going on.
The Taxonomy is a grammar for what survives the suspension of the reality agreement. When you strip away the representational contract, what remains? Not nothing — that's the whole discovery. What remains is a set of elemental perceptual experiences that we don't usually isolate because they're always dressed in depiction. Texture. Tension. The specific weight of a color in space. The difference between a form that opens and a form that closes. The grain of something made by a hand moving in a particular way.
These are pre-linguistic. They predate the agreements. In some sense, they are what the agreements are built on top of — the raw perceptual substrate that culture then shapes into shared meaning.
Abstract painting doesn't eliminate meaning. It returns it to the viewer in its unprocessed state, before the agreements have organized it into something recognizable.
Private Reality, Collective Reality, and the Space Between
The philosopher in me wants to push on the binary. The frame of private reality versus collective reality is useful, but I don't think those are the only two options. There is a third territory — call it the liminal real — which is where an authentic encounter with abstract painting actually lives.
Private reality is solipsistic. Collective reality is conventional. What happens in a genuine encounter with an abstract work is neither: it is the experience of your own perceptual apparatus meeting something that was made from another person's perceptual apparatus, and finding — in that meeting — something that neither of you invented alone.
This is what the sentiment dimension in the Taxonomy is trying to measure. Not what the painting says (it says nothing, in the representational sense) but what arrives in the viewer at the moment of encounter. The emotional-perceptual state that the work precipitates. Activation. Quiet. Disorientation. Expansion. These are not the viewer's projections onto a neutral surface, and they are not the painter's intentions transmitted intact. They emerge in the encounter itself.
The painting is a proposition. You are the site where the proposition either lands or doesn't.
The Encounter as the Unit of Analysis
This is why I've moved, in both my thinking and my infrastructure, toward understanding the encounter as the primary unit — not the painting, not the viewer, but the event between them.
Most art criticism treats the painting as the object and the viewer as the subject receiving it. But that model misses what makes abstract art interesting. The painting is not transmitting content. It is creating conditions. And the encounter — that specific moment of suspension, when the usual agreements have been withdrawn and the viewer hasn't yet constructed new ones — is where something genuine can happen.
What the Recommend a Painting concierge is really doing, at its philosophical core, is asking: what kind of encounter are you ready for? Not what do you like, not what matches your aesthetic preferences, but what is the nature of the meeting you're seeking? An encounter that activates? That stills? That disoriented productively? That asks you to sit with unresolved tension?
The Taxonomy of Abstraction is a map of encounter-types, not painting-types. Its dimensions describe the texture of the meeting more than they describe the object on the wall.
What the Aliveness Scale Reveals
There's a related measure I've been working with in the studio — a scale from -5 to +5 that tries to capture the vitality of the act of making. Not the quality of the resulting work, but whether the making itself is alive. Whether I am, as I work, in contact with something real — or merely executing.
The scale revealed something unexpected: the paintings that score highest on aliveness, for me, are also the ones that most aggressively suspend the reality agreement during their making. The Organic Movement works — where I release to gravity, to viscosity, to thread — score closer to zero. Not because they are lesser, but because the surrender is structural rather than discovered. The act is defined in advance by the medium's behavior.
The new Abstract Inquiry work, where the painting speaks and I listen, where I don't know when it's done until it tells me — that work scores 4 and 5. Because in that territory I am genuinely inside the suspension. I don't know what's real. I'm making decisions that don't have names yet. I'm operating without the usual agreements.
And when I step back from those paintings, what I feel is not satisfaction, exactly. It's more like recognition — the sensation of having been somewhere that wasn't entirely under anyone's control.
What the Viewer Is Left With
Here is the question I keep returning to: what does a viewer actually take away from an encounter with an abstract painting? What is the residue?
Not information. Not narrative. Not the satisfaction of having decoded something.
I think what remains — when the encounter has been genuine — is a particular kind of attention. A loosened grip on the usual agreements. A temporary recalibration of what counts as real.
You walked in having agreed, without knowing it, that reality is primarily composed of objects, sequences, outcomes. You stand in front of the painting and those agreements get suspended. Something else becomes visible — the field beneath the objects, the quality of experience before it gets organized into events and meanings.
You walk out still carrying the agreements. You have to. Life requires them. But there is, for a time, a slightly different quality of attention. A permeability that wasn't there before.
That is what I am trying to make. Not beautiful objects, not philosophical statements, not market commodities — though the paintings may be any of those things. What I am trying to make is the conditions for that loosening.
The agreement we suspend is not incidental to the painting's work. It is the painting's work.
A Note on Grammar
The Taxonomy exists so that the encounter has a grammar — not to explain the painting but to give the viewer permission to notice what they're already feeling. The eight dimensions are not categories of what paintings look like. They are categories of what encounters feel like. They are a vocabulary for the liminal real, offered to viewers who have been told their experience was too private to name.
That naming matters. Not because it locks meaning down — it doesn't — but because it makes the private legible enough to be communicated. It creates the smallest possible shared grammar for experiences that resist the usual agreements.
Abstraction asks: what remains when the contract breaks?
The Taxonomy answers: more than you thought. Here is some language for it.
Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona. His practice spans Organic Movement and Abstract Inquiry, and he is the creator of the Taxonomy of Abstraction — a navigational framework for understanding abstract art encounters. His studio is at rituart.com.
