As Paul Klee writes, a good painting puts into effect a process of cosmogenesis.
Everything starts with “chaos,” or with a “grey point.” Chaos is the origin of all visible things, and all colours are contained in it. Colours form the world of any painting. Chaos, then, is the unlimited flow of invisible possibilities – a river of preformed chromatic life.
A painter needs to go through chaos to produce something unique. S/he needs to be reborn to create something new and fresh and unique, like if it were her/his own birth. Her/his creation is her/his (re)birth. A true painting is a revelation. A true painter is a shaman who sees the world through colours, who merges with and bursts out a world on a canvas.
Without chaos there would be no world, as the world (cosmos) is the river of a number of formed possibilities, while chaos is the river of all unformed possibilities; and no world would ever be possible without its own constitutive possibilities crystallising at some point. A true painting makes this cosmogenesis visible.
Painting, then, is the exploration of the visible so as to reach the invisible, the process through which the invisible becomes visible. Balthus, for example, paints in this way the essence of adolescence and pubescence: goddesses and their apparitions, for essences are not static archetypes. In turn, Deleuze, writing on Bacon, says that a good work of art captures forces and transmits affects. In both cases, the canvas is translucent to an event, or a disclosure, the result of which is always the dynamic taking-shape of a certain world. Cosmogenesis.
The cosmogenesis of an apple, for instance; or its appleness. Cézanne’s biggest challenge was to paint it. Like Rothko’s was to capture blueness, or redness, or blackness. Since, ultimately, as Maldeney suggests, there is no difference between abstract and figurative painting when cosmogenesis is at stake.
Images: Paul Cézanne, Nature morte aux pommes (c. 1890); Mark Rothko, Black, Red and Black (1968).
Further reading: Gille Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; Lance Esplund, The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art