"But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live"

Art here is understood as a builder of conditions, not a producer of images. To create space is to carve out an arena of perception where forms, colors, and intervals can act, breathe, and persist. Such space is not merely the illusion of depth; it is a lived field of relations that engages the body and attention of the viewer. When this field is clear and uncompromised, the elements of painting become subjects in their own right, not props for a story or ornaments on a surface.

Decoration burdens the picture plane with surplus flourish, appealing to taste but leaving little room for thought or movement. Illustration ties the work to an external narrative, recruiting its elements to serve a plot or message. Both place something over the visual field, pleasing surface or predetermined story, and thereby narrow the experiential horizon. Creating space requires restraint and structural clarity: the discipline to let negative space act, to allow edges to articulate pressure, to let color and shape generate a quiet but exacting drama.

In such a space, the subject is not a depicted object but a dynamic equilibrium among forces, weight and lift, push and pull, expansion and containment. The painting becomes a site where time accumulates: the viewer lingers, circuits of looking form and reform, subtleties appear, vanish, and reappear. The work is not a window onto a scene but a room one can inhabit, a climate of attentiveness. Scale, rhythm, and material direct how the eye travels and how the body feels proportion; nothing extraneous interrupts that journey.

To let subjects live is to give them autonomy. Colors interact without allegory; lines assert direction without anecdote; shapes find their necessity through relation rather than resemblance. Space, then, is an ethic of freedom inside form, a promise that art can be a place rather than a picture, a present tense rather than a representation.