Silent Syntax – The Action of Abstraction
Stuart Veech
June 10 - July 24 2025
The exhibition “Silent Syntax” marks the culmination of the curatorial cycle “Beyond Existence”. If the earlier exhibitions mapped tensions between subjectivity and external world, language and power, myth and transformation, “Silent Syntax” retracts from these thematic surfaces into the conditions of form themselves—toward the unspoken structures that make experience possible.
Abstraction is not offered as an aesthetic category but as an operative mode of human action, a way of structuring the world prior to meaning. Traditionally, abstraction has been tethered to the contemplative, immaterial sphere—as if its distance from figuration marked a withdrawal from the world. In “Silent Syntax”, this configuration is displaced: abstraction becomes the condition of world-formation itself. What had been treated as conceptual distance or speculative reduction reappears as spatial logic - abstraction not so much as removal, but as a form-producing operation embedded in perception.
This logic of abstraction as spatial operation finds its most condensed articulation in the black monochrome: not only as visual minimalism, but an industrial, materially dense surface calibrated top absorb, refract and reflect the immediate environment. In Veech’s works, the black surface becomes a site of relational modulation, where light, shadow and color gradients register as environmental variables activated by the viewer’s movement and position. The monochrome thus ceases to be a sign of reduction and it becomes a structural field of interaction, materially grounded and environmentally responsive.
This reframing calls into question the old division between vita activa and vita contemplativa. While Hannah Arendt famously places thought outside the realm of action—silent, internal, withdrawn—Veech’s work forces a reconsideration. His modular reliefs, rotational systems, and spatial articulations do not fabricate objects in the traditional sense, but configure the perceptual and cognitive fields through which objecthood itself becomes intelligible: thought here is not excluded from action, it is action.
The stakes of this operation become clearer when considered through Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spherology, which posits space as an existential structure rather than a neutral container. Veech’s works do not depict such spaces; they enact them. They construct relational micro-spheres in which perception, orientation, and material interaction co-produce appearance. These works are not hermetic interiors, they are to be understood as dynamic enclosures, open to movement and restructured by presence.
Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of space as socially and mentally produced lends additional weight. For Lefebvre, space is never a passive background to action; it is already action, produced by rhythms, relations, and forces. The same is true in Veech’s reliefs, which materialize space through subtle dislocations and modular tensions. The viewers don’t interpret these configurations from an exterior position, they are drawn into a spatial negotiation—rotated into a logic of perceptual instability and deferred legibility.
The works cannot be reduced to autonomous forms. Their structural logic is not given in advance, but accumulates relationally, across sequences of approach, light, rotation, and counter-movement. As the modular systems are encountered from different angles and under shifting conditions, what appeared fixed becomes operative. Orientation ceases to be a background condition and becomes the work’s material.
The insistence on relational instability distances these works from any reading that would treat them as minimalist citation or formalist solution. While they share visual legacies with Minimalism and Conceptual Architecture, their logic does not rely on stylistic reference or compositional derivation. They unfold through spatial cognition, internal procedures, and gradual articulation across perceptual fields.
The visual field remains contingent: what seemed stable becomes transitory. Form is not given in advance, it gets realized across intervals—through successive conditions of light, orientation, and relational exposure. Coherence is suspended, because the terms of the encounter are distributed and temporally layered. Perception does not arrive at a conclusion; it moves along a shifting axis that repositions the viewer within the structure, again and again.
