“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes” – Arshile Gorky. There was a time when abstraction in art was, as Wassily Kandinsky conceived it, an expression of the spiritual, of that which is beyond the solidly representational. The symphony of colour and form addressed art like a prayer, like an invocation that transcends reality, as a reflection of the inner spirit. Anthony Spagnol’s oeuvre, since his first exhibition in the early 1990s, always concerned the spiritual, even from his first figurative paintings, thematically linked to biblical personages. The chromatic quality of these early paintings impregnated the fabric of the painting with a profound meaning and effective symbolism. Through abstraction, Spagnol then carried these qualities forward; the genre lends itself more to expressions of the intangible, such as mysticism, faith and other otherworldly manifestations. Along the years, the duality of representation and abstraction has defined his oeuvre; Spagnol continued to explore the possibilities of both, without exclusion and preference towards a single mode of expression. “We live in a world where we do not have control...