of “rhythmic abstraction"

Of Rythmic Abstraction

January 8, 2026

Flores’s reading of Cid Reyes privileges aesthetic mystification over methodological rigor, collapsing formal description into metaphysical claims and eliding historical, social, and discursive contexts that would complicate the neat narrative of “rhythmic abstraction” Flores advances; this rebuttal shows how his premises rest on selective analogy, formalist bias, and unexamined teleology.

Overview of Flores’s premises

Flores frames Reyes as an artist-critic whose abstract work is a “gesture,” a “rustle of language,” and a musicalized geometry; he links Reyes to Mondrian, Ocampo, collage practice, and a Baroque/jazz idiom, and treats these affinities as explanatory rather than interpretive.

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Table: Premises versus Critical Rebuttals

| Premise (Flores) | Claimed Evidence | Critical Problem | Alternative Account |

|---|---:|---|---|

| Art as gesture, not code | Poetic description of abstraction as “rustle” | Romanticizes opacity; avoids semiotic analysis | Abstract works can be read as systems of signs with social referents |

| Abstract resists “ways of seeing” | Generalized theory of perception | Empirically vague; ignores institutional framing | Viewing is mediated by markets, pedagogy, and politics |

| Reworking Mondrian via neon | Artist’s own note on serial imagery | Substituting color ≠ structural reworking | Color shift may be stylistic citation, not theoretical revision |

| Musical analogy (Baroque/jazz) | Formal parallels: counterpoint, improvisation | Analogy conflates metaphor with mechanism | Music metaphor useful rhetorically but insufficient analytically |

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Formalism versus historicism

Flores’s essay privileges formal analogy—color as “tango,” stripes as “crescendo”—without demonstrating how these formal choices operate within specific historical or institutional matrices. This is a classic formalist move: aesthetic qualities are universalized and thereby depoliticized. A robust critique would situate Reyes’s neon palettes and checkerboards within local exhibition economies, pedagogical lineages, and transnational circulations rather than treating them as autonomous signs.

The limits of analogy and metaphor

Flores repeatedly uses musical and choreographic metaphors to make abstraction legible. Metaphor can illuminate, but Flores treats it as proof. Metaphor is not method: to claim that stripes function like musical counterpoint requires operationalization—how do compositional intervals map onto perceptual time?—which Flores does not provide. The result is persuasive rhetoric, not falsifiable argument.

Selective historiography and attribution

Flores’s genealogy—linking Reyes to Mondrian and Ocampo—relies on selective citation of moments that fit the thesis (e.g., Reyes’s 1976 notes) while eliding countervailing evidence such as local debates about abstraction’s social role or contemporaneous critical dissent. This creates a teleology in which Reyes’s later “return” to painting reads as inevitable rather than contingent.

On the claim that abstraction “slips away” from seeing

The assertion that abstraction inherently resists habitual seeing is normative and masks the fact that viewing practices are learned and institutionalized. Abstraction can be made legible through pedagogy, curatorial framing, and market narratives; it does not possess an ontological slipperiness that exempts it from social explanation.

Conclusion: Toward a more rigorous critique

A productive debunking replaces romantic formalism with a mixed method: close formal analysis tied to archival evidence, exhibition histories, and reception studies. Reyes’s neon stripes and checkerboards deserve both aesthetic attention and contextual interrogation—only then can claims about rhythm, improvisation, and “geometry in motion” be sustained beyond evocative prose.