Through the structuring of nature, Piet Mondrian eventually ends up in the absolutely ideal abstraction. From that moment on he creates compositions with geometric shapes without any reference to nature. His method becomes a self-generating ideal system. In essence, it is this kind of process that is described by Husserl in “On the Origin of Geometry”. In Egypt, measuring liberates itself from its concrete function - the re-establishment of the boundaries of the rice fields - to become an abstract system. For Husserl, this detachment from concrete reality is the cause of the crisis in which European thinking has found itself. Husserl observes an alienation from our thinking, it only has an instrumental function. It is difficult to deny that Western scientific-economic thinking is in crisis in times of global warming. This analytically rational approach to reality originated with Descartes. Descartes was convinced that everything can be explained rationally thanks to the analytical method. As a result, man in itself becomes an object to be studied. To the dismay of the radical rationalists, there is still a subject that is difficult to analyze, a resisting remainder that is just beyond reason. Man has soul. That man is a longing being, aware of his mortality and the absurdity of this condition remains difficult to rationally explain let alone master.
But this problem is also not far away in the field of language. Mallarmé already made a distinction between a language to be used for ordinary communication and the poetic language, a language that is able to parry the ineffability through its cracks and crevices. Writing a poem -just like any other text- is a practice. A process in which the writer brings out in himself contents that would otherwise have remained unconscious or at least dormant.
It is a kind of self-psychoanalytic practice.
The visual arts also have that ability.
In my visual practice I generate images that give me access to my own world - I start drawing in communication with myself - but through the concrete images a communication with the other is also started.