The history of 20th-century art shows that abstraction was not merely a search for new visual forms, but an attempt to redefine the role of the image within culture. Modernists—Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Hilma af Klint—believed that form could express the invisible: spirituality, order, and the universal laws of the cosmos. Their works were not only artistic experiments but also epistemological projects: attempts to create a language capable of communicating with that which lies beyond everyday perception.
Conscious Abstraction continues this tradition, but shifts the emphasis from expression and intuition to communicative structure. Its aim is no longer solely to spiritually move the viewer, but to create a system of meanings in which the image functions like a language—with its own grammar, logic, and capacity for understanding. In this way, it becomes part of the long lineage of attempts to construct art as a form of knowledge.
Modernist abstraction was born in a climate of spiritual and philosophical exploration. Kandinsky wrote of an “inner necessity” that was to be the imperative of creation—the work emerging not from aesthetic calculation, but from the artist’s deep need. Mondrian saw in art a reflection of cosmic order, while Malevich considered it a path toward a “pure feeling,” free from all materiality.
The common denominator of these explorations was the belief that the image could serve a cognitive function—that it was capable of revealing truths hidden beneath the surface of reality. However, modernism operated primarily within the field of expression: the meaning of the work remained bound to the artist’s intention, and the viewer was expected more to empathize than to reconstruct a system of meanings on their own.
Conscious Abstraction takes over the modernist demand for authenticity but transforms it into a more systemic direction. “Inner necessity” here is not merely an intuitive impulse but a thought-structure rooted in the relationships between abstract concepts, emotions, and symbols. Every visual form must result from the logic of the whole, much as a sentence in language emerges from grammar.
This emphasis on structure allows the work to be treated not only as an expression of spiritual need but as a communicative model. The viewer is no longer a passive empathizer but an active co-creator of meaning. The significance of the image arises in a dynamic process of interpretation, in which the system designed by the artist encounters the viewer’s cognitive competencies.
Modernism and Conscious Abstraction share the conviction of the image’s autonomy. For Malevich, Suprematism was “pure painting,” freed from objecthood. Similarly, Conscious Abstraction rejects the mimetic function of art but understands autonomy not as isolation within the world of aesthetics, but as the capacity to build its own structures of meaning.
The image does not describe reality but constructs it—whether through the geometric reduction of modernism or through the symbolic relations of Conscious Abstraction. In both cases, the work is a cognitive tool that reveals hidden layers of reality.
The key difference lies in the nature of the knowledge to which the two movements aspire. Modernism sought spiritual and aesthetic truth—the artwork was meant to lead to transcendence. Conscious Abstraction shifts the focus toward epistemology: it treats art as a method of examining abstract dogmas, conceptual and relational structures that shape our way of understanding the world.
Thus, Conscious Abstraction situates itself within the tradition of the philosophy of language and semiotics. Here the image functions like a system of signs, where meaning arises not from a single symbol but from the relations between elements. This brings it close to structuralist and post-structuralist concepts (Saussure, Barthes), but develops them in the practice of painting, in which the viewer becomes an active participant in the communicative process.
In summary, Modernism and Conscious Abstraction share common foundations:
- the belief in art as a tool of knowledge,
- the pursuit of a universal language,
- the primacy of the work’s inner logic over its representational function.
What differentiates them, however, is the scope of this logic. Modernism focused on the artist’s intention and spiritual resonance, whereas Conscious Abstraction is based on the co-creation of meanings within a relational system. Its language is more precise, rooted in phenomenological and communicative reflection.
In this way, Conscious Abstraction does not negate modernism but develops it in the context of contemporary cognitive needs. It marks a step toward an art that not only moves or inspires but also enables thought—and enables thinking together, in dialogue between artist and viewer.