Abstract Art as Event

These reflections were born from a visit to Mattia Moreni. The Bologna Anthology, 1965, currently on view at MAMbo – Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna through May 31, 2026. The exhibition reconstructs Moreni's pivotal season of the 1960s, the same years in which Francesco Arcangeli developed his reading of the painter's radical relationship with the world.

In recent days, in the comments under one of my posts on Mattia Moreni, a precise question emerged: what if abstraction does not originate on the canvas, but happens in the world?
Looking at Moreni’s paintings — particularly the works from the 1960s associated with the cartelli cycle — the landscape appears as a continuous field: earth and sky, deep greens and blues unfolding without interruption.
Then something happens.
A disruption cuts through and fractures the scene.
A signal emerges from nowhere and, like a magnet, condenses atmospheric intensity into a single point.

The works I’m referring to can be seen here

This perspective resonates with the reading proposed in 1965 by Francesco Arcangeli, who saw in Moreni’s painting a radical way of being in relation to the world.
In this sense, abstraction is not a rewriting of reality, but the point at which reality opens a breach and intensifies.
The artist intercepts these epiphanies, receives them, and fixes them — registering an event.
In the comments, several artists recognized something similar within their own practice: forms that seem to emerge almost autonomously, sometimes asserting themselves, sometimes dissolving in the process.
One artist described them as “small gems,” fragile and easily lost.
Others spoke of a subtle dynamic in which a form appears to surface directly from the material itself.

What if abstraction were not a stylistic choice, but a way of recording events of perception?
The abstract mark is not the symbol of something else.
It is the trace of an encounter.
The moment in which reality ceases to be a backdrop and begins to act.

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If you work with abstraction, do you recognize this moment?
When a presence surfaces on its own, before it is even thought?