Principles of Critical Abstraction and/or Color-Realism care of Professional Abstract Artist Michel Luc Bellemare Jul. 2014

The Primary Principles of Critical Abstraction and/or Color-Realism:
Michel Luc Bellemare©

1. Color is as real as reality gets.
What this means is that color is the fundamental concept and/or structure of reality. If reality is
a language, i.e. a series of languages from alpha to omega, it is by the concept of color that a
language exists, namely without a division of color there are no symbols and/or language
characters for that matter. It is the initial division of color, i.e. the concept of color,that allows
reality to present itself as a thought-concept and to be conceptualized. There is no outside the
concept of color; hence the notion that color is as real as reality gets as it is the most abstract
concept. As well, this means that abstract art must communicate something concrete about
everyday life, it must question social norms and our traditional concepts about art.

2. Everything is abstract, conceptual to the end; reality, materiality, is but variations in degrees
of abstraction based on the concept of color, and this fundamental color-concept is gray in
origin, indeterminate, ambiguous and pure deception.
What this means is that there is nothing outside the mental faculty, what reality is exists only in
consciousness, initially as abstract color and nothing else. What we understand of the world
outside via the human senses is conceptual through and through. What we touch, smell, taste,
see, hear are concepts, abstract concepts that are processed and comprehended only in
consciousness.
3. Art is real actions that revolutionize conventional standards, specifically conventional practice
and aesthetic standard(s) through critical analysis, creative critique, creative re-interpretation
and constructive innovation of outdated standardized art-forms and conventional ways of
doing and seeing things. As a result, art is the continuation of philosophy via other means.
What this means is that today avant-garde art should attempt to reinvest the individual with
power as the arbiters of what constitutes art and more importantly what constitutes a
museum/art object. Color-realism attempts via avant-garde art to transfer power and
technology from the social worker/bureaucrat to the artist and the individual. Color-realism is
an avant-garde, a re-interpretation of past avant-gardes. Color-realism is the inheritor of the
avant-garde spirit that is never extinguished. For color-realism, the revolution of everyday life
that was present in past avant-garde movements has not been extinguished; it has simply been
re-configured at the micro-levels of everyday life. True, the total revolution of everyday life that
past avant-garde movements, automatist revolution etc., have attempted to bring forth is no
longer an option, meaning that a total-refusal of the status quo is problematic and impossible.