Color and Line

A few posts ago I spoke of the two-fold of line and color as fundamental principles in a dialectical conception of painting.

Color aught to be concieved as the impressionists saw it: it is a painting of light, it is difference, gradient, shifts, flames, rays, it is intimation of movement and time.

This can be contrasted with line which is the identity - distinction of geometry, of space. It can be graphological or territorial. It is mapping and rendering ratio. Classical ideals pertain to line, and modernist conceptual work tends to as well.

Of course everything is a synthesis of both Color and Line, the real question regards the character of the synthesis. There is no relation of subordination in either way - ideally the poles relate so as to mutually shatter each other into plurality and difference (a different kind of difference, the continuum - between - substrate of - historical art formations). A mutual shattering which nontheless comes to a higher order unity, an abscent unity as it where. which would be a something which comprehensively comes to integrate different historical modes of relating to art (such as religious, modernist, classical and romantic).