A non-figurative artist tries to express what he or she actually feels without figurative mediation, only with the help of colors play, shapes and rhythm, visual equivalents of his or her emotions and sensations. Hence, we have the update of ‘non-figurative landscape’, which the artists reached after various experiments, from Cubism to Surrealism. The following artists left the initiative for the audience – Bazin and Manessier, Bissière, Estève, Le Moal, Singier, Vieira da Silva.
Non-figurative painting is one of the most important forms of expression in the art of the XX century.
In order to avoid too limited meaning of ‘abstraction’, many artists of the postwar period came to defining a new aesthetic concept by introducing the term ‘non-figurative art’ to the vocabulary of contemporary art. A new expression of non-figurative art seemed to be opposed to abstraction, which served for systematic reconstruction of nature on the basis of schemes (for example, geometric) rules dictated by mind and which sterilized any creation in favor of purely intellectual speculation. Enriched by the liberty inherited from the pioneers of abstract art, these artists do not care about similarities and give us a direct and new sense of life.
Non-figurative art marks the transition from a passive ‘given’ nature of the figurative (or imitative) art to the ‘nature in action’ when a viewer and a creative artist as well, open secret life of things and living creatures in the union of primary elements (earth, air, water, fire). Figurative image is destroyed together with the refusal from the illusory imitation of things, and non-figurative image restores the nature that never excludes human. In fact, non-figurative art is not only a reaction to the cold abstraction, it is the evidence of a new attitude to the external world, and, according to Manessier, ‘it is a chance of modernity, which helps an artist to return to his reality and restore faith in the fact that it is the main’.
According to Bazin, it is possible to set close connection between the man and the world, an artist and the nature: ‘Genuine sensitivity is born when the artist discovers that the thrill of the tree crown and the water surface are alike, as well as the stones and his face, and that gradually shrinking world regenerates itself in the infinity of the external manifestations in the shape of the great basic signs, defining both its truth and the truth of the universe’.