Geometric Expressionism

Geometric Expressionism is an art style that uses isometric perspective to pair emotion with a cerebral context. By using isometric perspective to create the illusion of depth, Geometric Expressionism has the third dimension to consider when creating the patterns and forming relationships. This increases both the possibilities and complexities of the painting.

Aside from using 3d shapes, Geometric Expressionism retains represented imagery in order to link it to a context in reality. This ensures that emotional engagement is weaved into a cerebral dimension of life. 

How Geometric Expressionism differs from Cubism

Pablo Picasso’s weeping women series, done in a Cubist style, has a strange emotional effect on the viewer. Although the paintings are highly emotional, the use of geometry creates a kind of emotional restraint so that the paintings feel like looking at a woman’s tears in an intellectual way. The overall experience is thus one of cerebral stimulation and emotional tension. To put it another way, just as a black and white photo of a nude lady is stripped of its emotion allowing the photo to be more about intellectual “art” than lustful “pornography”, the geometric infusion allow for logical consideration while still retaining the tension of emotion that is there, but held back.

It must be stressed that the emotional restraint of Cubism was a side effect of the style, rather than its intention. When it was invented, Cubism was done so as an experiment in linear perspective. The idea was that a true impression of a subject is a mosaic of multiple viewings rather than a snap shot seen in a photographic style painting. This theory resulted in Cubist artists fusing their linear geometric forms into each other before moving into 2d style representation seen in Picasso’s Weeping Women. 

Whereas emotional restraint is a side effect of Cubism, it is the intention of Geometric Expression. In myth, art is a hedonistic expression of emotion, but art that seeks such an aim is inevitably transient and short lived. By shaping emotion into form and linking it to a cerebral context, Geometric Expressionism allows emotional tension to be paired with intellectual thought. 

How Geometric Expressionism is different Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism and Geometric Abstraction  

 Kazemir Malevich’s Supremacism, Pier Mondrian’s Geometric Abstraction and some forms of Abstract Expressionism all use geometric shapes. Although they use geometric shapes, they are usually 2 dimensional, rather than 3 dimensional shapes. The use of 2 dimension shapes limits the complexity of the patterns as well as the ability to guide a viewer’s eye around and through a painting. 

Aside from using 3d geometric forms, Geometric Expressionism incorporates elements that have an objective representative context. Suprematism, which gave rise to Abstract Expressionism, rejected the realistic object because Malevich proposed that a painting that removed logic and objective form would have greater emotional intensity. According to his 1915 manifesto that accompanied the exhibition of a painted black square:

“Hence, to the Suprematist, the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.

Objectivity, in itself, is meaningless to him; the concepts of the conscious mind are worthless. Feeling is the determining factor … and thus art arrives at non objective representation at Suprematism…Everything which determined the objective ideal structure of life and of “art’ ideas, concepts, and images all this the artist has cast aside in order to heed pure feeling… Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of “things.”

Whether the disconnection from the real increases emotional intensity is something that could be debated. Obviously, the success of abstracted art over the last decade indicates many art buyers would agree with Malevich, but the even wider art world derision to the style would also suggest many others disagree. A counter argument is that emotion comes from life and the referencing of life’s stories. Once that emotion from life is evoked, then it works with the cerebral mind to process the emotion. Sometimes there may be a battle between liberation and restraint. At other times, there may be a harmony. In Geometric Expressionism, there may be either and sometimes both. At its core, Geometric Expressionism is a cerebral art form, which in turn requires referencing a context of reality. 

Chad Swanson