RituStudio · Phoenix, Arizona · Working Paper
A Taxonomy
of Abstraction
Texture, Form, and Colour Range as a new language for the desire for abstract art
Preface: At 2am in the Studio
This paper did not begin as a paper. It began as a problem I was trying to solve at two in the morning.
The problem was this: I had made 252 paintings, and I had no way to help someone find the one that was waiting for them.
Not because the paintings were undocumented. They were catalogued, photographed, titled, described. But the language available for describing abstract painting — the language of emotion, of art historical reference, of representation — is not the language a person uses when they are standing in a room, looking at a wall, trying to articulate what they want to feel when they walk in every morning for the next twenty years.
So I started building something. I started with the question: what does a painting actually do? Not what it means. Not what it references. What does it do — physically, perceptually, environmentally — to the person who lives with it?
In trying to answer that question, I ended up building a taxonomy. In building the taxonomy, I ended up building an AI that could use it. In building the AI, I realised I had built something that had never existed before: a structured model of the encounter between a person and an abstract painting. A system that listens to who you are, and finds the painting that is waiting for you.
The tools came first. The theory followed. This paper is the account of that language.
I. The Double Abstraction Problem
Abstract painting has a double language problem.
The surface failure is linguistic: we describe paintings through their effects rather than their causes. We say a painting is calming when we mean it has low chromatic tension and dissolving form. We say it is bold when we mean high formal clarity and saturated colour. These descriptions are accurate responses to physical properties. But they are downstream of the thing itself.
Beneath this is a more fundamental problem. Abstract painting has no representational language at all. A painting of a chair can be described by reference to the chair. An abstract painting can only be described by reference to the experience of looking at it. And that experience is irreducibly personal — different for every person, in every space, at every moment.
The Desire Problem
When a person wants an abstract painting, they are not trying to find an object that matches a specification. They are trying to find an object that matches a feeling they cannot yet name.
This is the double abstraction. The painting is abstract. The desire is abstract. There is no representational bridge between them.
Consider what a collector actually says when they begin looking. They say: something calming. Something that isn't too busy. Something with warmth. These are not descriptions of objects. They are descriptions of desired encounters. And they are entirely inadequate for finding the specific painting that will produce the specific encounter they are imagining.
A collector who says "I drive a Ferrari and I want something that understands that" is giving, in one sentence, the complete description of a desired encounter: precision, control, performance, restraint, Italian colour, zero sentimentality. Ferrari Aperture — a luminous yellow field with a single black aperture at its centre — is the answer to that description. The painting contains no reference to Ferrari. The match happens at the level of encounter, not representation.
The Prompting Problem
How do you ask for what you cannot name? This is the fundamental problem of any search across a domain where the vocabulary of the searcher does not match the vocabulary of the domain. In most domains there is a bridge: product specifications, genre categories, stylistic descriptors that both sides share. In abstract art, there is almost no shared vocabulary at all.
The taxonomy proposed in this paper is an attempt to build that bridge. The key insight is this: the matching does not happen at the level of the object. It happens at the level of the encounter. You are not searching for a painting with certain properties. You are searching for an encounter with certain qualities. And the encounter is a function of the painting, the person, the space, the light, and the moment — all at once.
II. The Three Physical Dimensions
Three dimensions describe the physical properties of an abstract painting — what it materially is and how it materially behaves. Each is scored 1 to 5. The scoring is intentionally subjective — these are perceptual categories, not measurable properties — but the subjectivity is bounded.
| Score | Texture | Form | Colour Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flat, smooth, photographic. No tactile quality. | Pure atmosphere, dissolving edges, no structure. | Monochrome. Single dominant tone. |
| 2 | Slight surface variation. The hand is present but doesn't insist. | Soft edge presence. Form implied rather than built. | Dominant palette with minor chromatic movement. |
| 3 | Worked surface. Multiple passes visible. Some passages catch light differently. | Clear compositional structure. Edges defined but not architectural. | Balanced palette. Multiple hues in dialogue. |
| 4 | High texture. Topographic relief. Visible at a distance. | Strong formal clarity. The composition holds a defined shape. | Wide colour range. Chromatic tension active. |
| 5 | Dimensional. Could be read by touch. Raised passages cast shadows. Different at different times of day. | Fully architectural. The painting is a structure, not just an image. | Full spectrum. Maximum chromatic complexity. |
Texture: What Photography Cannot Convey
Texture is the one thing photography cannot convey. You can photograph Waves of Threaded Flame — thread pulled through wet paint, fire in full motion — and what you see is beautiful. What you do not see is that the surface has topography. That it changes as you move. That in raking light, in the late afternoon when the sun hits the wall at an angle, the painting becomes something different from what it is at noon. There are passages where one layer of thread casts a shadow on the paint beneath it.
A high-texture painting in a space with directional lighting is a painting that changes through the day. A low-texture painting in the same space is stable — the same at 7am as at 7pm. Neither is superior. They are different instruments.
Form: The Architecture of the Encounter
Form is structural clarity. The degree to which a painting holds a defined compositional shape. Ferrari Aperture — a luminous yellow field with a single black aperture — is among the simplest paintings in the studio and among the highest in form. The form is absolute. One shape. Perfectly placed.
Most collectors who describe wanting something "not too busy" are in fact describing Form, not colour. They want dissolution over structure. Low form. Knowing this changes which paintings are relevant to their space — and changes the conversation entirely.
Form has the most direct relationship to how a painting interacts with its architectural environment. A high-form painting is an architectural partner. A low-form painting is an atmospheric intervention. Thread Witness — monochrome, disciplined, two marks choosing different paths — holds both: high form, high texture, no colour. The restraint is the message.
Colour Range: How Much Work the Painting Does
Colour Range is chromatic breadth — the span from monochrome to full spectrum. It is frequently confused with saturation, and the distinction matters. Ferrari Aperture is intensely yellow but has a Colour Range of 2 — almost monochrome in its chromatic commitment. Thread Witness is a 1. The discipline is absolute.
A Colour Range 5 painting in a room with competing visual complexity will fight everything. A Colour Range 1 or 2 painting in the same environment anchors the room by providing a resting point. The eye returns to it, finds nothing that demands resolution, and relaxes. This is not weakness. It is a different kind of strength.
III. Palette, Mood, and the Hook
Beyond the three physical dimensions, each painting carries a palette description (temperature, saturation, dominant colour), three mood descriptors, and a hook.
The hook is a single sentence written from the painting's perspective — not a title or a description of intent, but a phenomenological description of what it is like to be in front of the work. Across 252 paintings there are 60 distinct mood descriptors: meditative, deeply calm, vast inward silence, controlled energy, intimate restraint, plan failing beautifully, celebratory, rooted, discourse made visible.
Rangoli in Permanence — warm terracotta and gold, geometric structure dissolving at the edges into atmospheric warmth — carries the mood: celebratory / rooted / geometric joy. The hook: celebration that refuses to dissolve. A collector who grew up in India, who knows rangoli, who wants something that holds cultural memory without nostalgia — this is their painting. The taxonomy connects biography to encounter.
IV. The AI as a Listening System
The concierge built on this taxonomy is not a search engine. It is a listening system.
A search engine takes a query and finds objects that match it. A listening system takes a description of a person and a context, translates it through a structured framework, and finds the encounter that is waiting. The difference is not technical. It is philosophical.
The system asks three layers of questions. First: the context you have in mind — the room, the wall, the light, the architecture. Second: the context you want to create — the feeling you want to walk into, the emotional register you are reaching for. Third — which the best conversations reach — the context you are creating: who you are, what you have built, where you come from.
A collector who says "dark walls, high ceilings, serious collector" is describing the conditions for Cosmos Interstellar — a painting that needs height to become a portal, that needs dark surroundings to make its luminosity visible, that rewards the kind of sustained attention a serious collector brings. The taxonomy makes this match explicit.
Every conversation the system has is logged. The logs are the first systematic dataset of abstract art encounters ever collected. Over time, they describe the relationship between who people are and which paintings find them. That relationship is what this taxonomy is trying to name.
V. Toward a Universal Grammar
The taxonomy proposed here is calibrated to 252 paintings in one studio. But there is nothing in it specific to this studio, this artist, or this period. A Rothko can be scored on these dimensions. A Pollock, a Hilma af Klint, a Clyfford Still. The taxonomy is not about a style. It is about the phenomenology of abstract encounter, which is universal.
This is the larger ambition. Not to describe one catalog, but to propose a framework that could be applied across the full history of abstract painting — giving collectors, curators, designers, and anyone who has ever stood in front of an abstract work and felt something they could not name, a grammar for that feeling.
The taxonomy is the grammar. The paintings are the vocabulary. The encounter is the sentence that has never been written the same way twice.
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