Realism Without Resemblance

Stripe painting is often misread as reduction, the image stripped back to its minimum, all content evacuated. The argument here is the opposite. Stripe painting, when derived from sustained observation, is a form of realism. Not resemblance-based realism, which attempts to recreate the appearance of things, but structural realism: fidelity to the relationships that organise visual experience rather than to the surfaces that happen to clothe them. The distinction matters. Resemblance-based painting claims to show us what things look like. Structural painting claims something harder and less comfortable: that what things look like is not the same as what they are. And that painting which looks nothing like its subject can be more truthful than painting that resembles it precisely. This is the realism paradox at the centre of stripe painting practice.

​

Where Resemblance Fails

Representation’s claim to realism rests on producing visual similarity between painted surface and observed subject. Academic tradition teaches that realism means making the painting look like what is being painted, achieving likeness, creating convincing illusion. The better the resemblance, the more realist the work. But this equation collapses under scrutiny, because resemblance often requires simplification of the very perceptual conditions it claims to honour.

Consider Renaissance perspective: a powerful geometric model that produces convincing pictorial space. It works, but it works by compressing perception into a single viewpoint. Human vision is binocular and mobile; we understand space through continuous movement and comparison. Perspective’s realism is therefore the realism of an elegant constraint: a useful fiction that feels right, even as it translates embodied seeing into the viewpoint of a hypothetical, frozen observer.

Photography sharpened the problem. Once mechanical reproduction could deliver effortless optical resemblance, painting’s investment in likeness could no longer claim uniqueness. If realism is defined as resemblance, cameras do it more consistently. Painting’s seriousness has to be located elsewhere — in what it can investigate that a lens cannot.

Even Vermeer, whose paintings can appear photographically real, sits inside this problem rather than outside it. The hypothesised influence of optical tools such as the camera obscura remains debated, but the broader point stands: what we sometimes admire as “photographic” realism can also be realism of an optical model, fidelity to a particular way of seeing, not a transparent delivery of embodied perception.

​

What Observation Actually Yields

Cézanne understood the difficulty, even if he refused easy resolution. His repeated returns to Mont Sainte-Victoire, his sense that sensation could not be “realised” once and for all, his late works that remain open rather than closed, these are not simply questions of technique or finish. They are evidence of a philosophical problem made visible in paint. Rigorous observation does not deliver stable optical data suitable for photographic reproduction. What it delivers is shifting, ambiguous, multiply organised perceptual experience. His late watercolours are not incomplete studies. They are complete investigations of what observation reveals when pursued without compromise.

Mondrian’s progression from his tree studies (1908–1912) traces the same discovery. Each iteration removes representational detail while retaining structural relationships found through sustained looking. The branching trees become grid, not because grid was imposed arbitrarily, but because vertical and horizontal relationships can structure the perception of trees more fundamentally than curving branches or leafy masses. The grid is what remains when the incidental is progressively eliminated. For stripe painting practice, this trajectory is decisive. Architecture already presents geometric structure explicitly. When a stripe painter derives sequences from a Provençal colonnade, the vertical divisions are already there. What the painting preserves is not the columns’ material, not their three-dimensionality, not their surface appearance. What it preserves is the proportional relationship: interval, rhythm, grouping, hierarchy. What does not transfer is local detail, and this is not loss but methodological refinement.

​

Structural Realism

In painting, structural realism means this: a work can be grounded in observation while refusing resemblance, by preserving the relational structure through which perception organises the world. Philosophy of science uses a related term, “structural realism”,  to describe how theories can be realistic by capturing the structure of relationships rather than by mirroring reality directly. A model may not depict the world, yet still represent its organisation with increasing accuracy. Applied to painting, the lesson is simple: observation-based abstraction can achieve realistic status by preserving structure without attempting likeness. A stripe painting does not claim to show what a façade looks like. It claims to preserve the proportional relationships, rhythmic intervals, and colour-temperature structures that organise how a façade is perceived. This is structural truth about visual experience. What survives translation from architecture to canvas? Proportion transfers directly. A window-to-wall ratio of 1:3 can be encoded through stripe widths: a narrow stripe beside a wider stripe three times its width. The architectural proportion becomes a painted proportion. The medium changes, dimensionality reduces, but the relationship persists.

Colour temperature structure translates systematically. A warm ochre surface in direct Mediterranean light beside a cool grey shadow encodes depth information: relief is revealed through temperature differential. The painted stripe preserves this warm-advancing / cool-receding structure. It does not need to match the exact hue of the stone. Structural truth is served by preserving the temperature opposition; mimicking local colour would add nothing. Rhythmic interval transfers when it engages similar perceptual mechanisms at different scales. The architectural rhythm of column, space, column, space becomes the stripe rhythm of narrow, wide, narrow, wide. The absolute measurements change; the rhythmic relationship persists. What does not transfer is local incident, surface weathering, decorative mouldings, accidental texture. Like a theory that discards phenomenological complexity to reveal underlying organisation, stripe painting eliminates what is incidental in order to preserve what is essential.

​

The Paradox Resolved

The realism paradox dissolves once we understand what realism actually requires. Perceptual experience is not a photographic snapshot. It is durational, embodied, and structured, an ongoing process of organisation and reorganisation. What Cézanne’s late work preserves, and what observation-based stripe painting preserves, is not appearance but the relational structure through which perception organises experience. Realism is not about how things look. It is about how they are organised.

This resolves the false binary between representation and abstraction. These are not opposing categories but different strategies for engaging observed reality. Observation grounds the work in external fact; abstraction allows preservation of structural truth without illusionistic falsification. The stripe painter does not choose between depicting a building or painting pure invention. The practice escapes this choice entirely. And there is one final clarification that makes the claim durable: studio translation is also a form of filtering, through memory, temporal delay, and method. But that filtration is not a weakness. It is the method. The delay is part of what the work investigates: which relationships persist when the incidental falls away.

Painting’s post-photographic crisis is only a crisis if painting competes with photography as a resemblance technology. If it retreats into pure formalism, it severs connection to observed reality. Observation-based stripe abstraction is the third option: investigating perceptual structure through systematic looking and abstract translation, producing knowledge about how visual experience is organised that photography cannot capture and theory alone cannot produce. The stripe sequence that encodes observed proportions, temperatures, and rhythms can be more truthful to how architectural form structures visual experience than photographic documentation that captures appearance while flattening perceptual dynamics. The painting that looks nothing like the building it came from may know the building more deeply than any photograph of it.

​

Adapted from Harry MC’s book Stripe Painting: Observation and Realism in Abstract Art (Florence & Gertrude Editions, 2026).