Between Seeing and Feeling: Analogy’s Role in Abstract Art
Unveiling the Analogy
Exploring Symbol and Meaning in Contemporary Art
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art, where boundaries blur and medium intermingle, analogy remains a powerful and enduring strategy. Analogy—drawing connections between seemingly unrelated elements—offers both artists and viewers a way to create and discover meaning beyond the literal. It enables artists to embed conceptual weight within their works, allowing ordinary materials or abstract compositions to speak to broaden human experiences. This conceptual thread runs through much of today’s visual language, shaping how we perceive, interpret, and connect with art in more profound and personal ways.
What Is Analogy in Art?
Analogy in art is more than a literary tool—it’s a conceptual and visual strategy that transcends language and taps into our deeper cognitive and emotional faculties. Artists use analogy to bridge form and thought, emotion and structure, crafting visual parallels that often resonate long before they are consciously understood. An abstract texture might suggest the fragility of memory; a fractured line might echo emotional rupture or unresolved tension. Through carefully orchestrated visual cues, artists encourage viewers to step into a space of interpretation, where ambiguity becomes a strength rather than a limitation.
Unlike metaphor, which replaces one idea with another (this is that), analogy compares one idea to another (this is like that), allowing a more flexible and associative form of understanding. It links the personal to the universal, the tangible to the abstract, inviting viewers to form unique and evolving meanings based on their own emotional and intellectual frameworks.
Feeling Through Form
Many contemporary artists use analogy to express emotion without depicting it directly. Mark Rothko’s expansive color fields, for example, function as analogues for deep psychological and spiritual states—his works don’t describe emotion, they embody it. The enveloping fields of red, blue, or ochre are not windows but thresholds, portals into the subconscious. Similarly, Anselm Kiefer’s textured, elemental surfaces evoke trauma, memory, and the complex weight of history through his use of lead, ash, straw, and scorched surfaces. These physical elements serve not merely as materials but as emotional metaphors that carry the imprint of time and human experience.
In this way, analogy becomes a language of feeling. It asks viewers not only to see but to sense what the work conveys. The experience becomes not just intellectual but affective—an encounter with meaning that is often deeply personal and transformative, as the viewer projects their inner world onto the visual cues provided.
Analogy in Abstraction and Conceptual Practice
Abstract and conceptual art thrive on analogical thinking, especially in their resistance to fixed narrative or literal interpretation. Free from overt subject matter, abstraction opens space for viewers to construct their own associations and meanings. One viewer might interpret a series of overlapping geometric forms as geological strata; another might see them as metaphorical layers of personal identity or emotional history. This open-endedness fosters a multiplicity of readings, turning the artwork into a conversation rather than a statement.
Conceptual artists often harness the power of juxtaposition to build analogical tension. In the work of Barbara Kruger, for instance, the bold use of declarative text over black-and-white photography confronts viewers with the collision between media culture and individual agency. Joseph Kosuth’s linguistic investigations position language itself as a visual medium, creating analogies between signifier and meaning, perception and reality. These works challenge the viewer to engage both critically and emotionally, forming interpretations that live beyond the gallery wall.
Material as Meaning
In many contemporary practices, the material itself becomes an analogical device—less a vehicle for representation than a subject. Earth, hair, wax, rust—these organic and often transient substances evoke cycles of life, decay, and regeneration. Their visual and tactile qualities mirror the emotional or philosophical content of the work, often blurring the line between concept and matter.
El Anatsui, for example, creates vast, tapestry-like installations from discarded bottle caps and found metals. These materials, once considered waste, are transformed into shimmering analogues for resilience, transformation, and postcolonial identity. The physical qualities of the materials—crushed, bent, folded—become visual symbols of cultural history and memory. In such cases, form and content are inextricably linked: the analogy is not merely suggested by the image but inscribed within its very surface.
The Viewer’s Role
One of the most compelling aspects of analogy in art is that it relies on the viewer to activate the comparison. Rather than presenting a fixed interpretation, analogy invites the viewer to complete the thought—to connect the dots using their own experiences, memories, and emotions. This interactive process fosters a sense of intimacy, personal agency, and creative co-authorship between artist and audience.
In contemporary abstract photography, for instance, surface details like peeling paint, blurred motion, or oxidized metal serve as emotional cues. These elements aren’t explicit symbols but open-ended suggestions—fragments of meaning that depend on the viewer’s perspective to take shape. Each person brings their own psychological and emotional lens to the work, ensuring that no two readings are ever quite the same. In this way, analogy transforms the act of looking into a process of personal discovery.
The Challenge and Beauty of Analogy
Using analogy is not without its challenges. It requires a delicate balance of clarity and ambiguity, demanding that artists trust their audience’s willingness to engage deeply. If the work is too obscure, it risks alienation or misinterpretation; too direct, and it becomes didactic, leaving no room for imagination. But when executed with care and sensitivity, analogy creates a bridge—a shared space where the artist’s intention and the viewer’s insight can coexist and enrich one another.
In an era dominated by fast images, endless scrolling, and fleeting attention spans, analogy offers a counterpoint. It invites slowness and attentiveness, encouraging viewers to sit with a piece, to ponder its layers, to feel their way into its meaning. In return, the rewards are richer: insight that is not only understood but felt, making the encounter with art more enduring and impactful.
Why Analogy Still Matters
Analogy preserves complexity in a culture that often favors clarity and reduction. It helps us navigate the intangible aspects of life—grief, longing, resilience, wonder—through visual forms that resist simplification. Analogy reminds us that meaning in art, as in life, often emerges in the spaces between clarity and mystery, between what is seen and what is sensed.
Contemporary art that embraces analogy does more than decorating it communicates on a level that words alone cannot reach. It invites us to listen, to wonder, to imagine, and to take part in an unfolding process of interpretation. In doing so, it keeps the language of art vibrantly alive rooted in experience, responsive to emotion, and endlessly open.
Artist's Note
As a fine art photographer working in the realm of abstraction, analogy is at the heart of my creative process. My images often begin with formal explorations of light, texture, and composition—but they quickly evolve into something more internal, emotional, and interpretive. Each photograph becomes a visual suggestion, a fragment of thought rendered in tone and form. I rarely begin with a clear narrative; instead, I search for resonance—for that quiet space where what is seen gives way to what is felt.
In this space between appearance and meaning, analogy becomes the connective tissue. It links surface to story, form to emotion. And in the silence between shapes, shadows, and color, a conversation begins—one that I hope continues in the mind and heart of the viewer long after the image has been seen.
