Abstract or Figurative Painting: How to Tell the Styles Apart (and What Monochrome Means)

"Is it abstract, or is that a face I'm seeing?" I get some version of that question at nearly every exhibition, standing in front of a canvas where a profile seems to surface from the paint without ever settling into a portrait. Abstract, figurative, semi-figurative, monochrome — these words come up constantly in art conversations, yet they're often muddled, or set against each other too simply. As a painter who works across all three registers from my studio in the Tarn, here are some clear markers for telling these styles apart — and for understanding why they aren't mutually exclusive.

What actually separates abstract painting from figurative painting?

Figurative painting depicts a recognisable subject — a face, a landscape, an object — even when the style strays far from photographic realism: a Cubist portrait is still figurative as long as a face can be read in it. Abstract painting, by contrast, doesn't aim to represent the visible world at all: it builds its subject purely from form, colour, line and material, with no external reference to name. Between the two lies a wide territory where both logics overlap — and that's where a good deal of contemporary art, including part of my own work, takes root.

Between the two: what is semi-figurative painting?

Semi-figurative painting suggests a subject without fully describing it: a sketched-in silhouette, a gaze emerging from the composition, a recognisable posture within a tangle of form. That tension between reading a subject and losing it runs through much of 20th-century art history, from Cubism, which fragments the face without erasing it, to Expressionism, which distorts the figure to intensify its emotion. It's also the territory I place canvases like Armure d'Enfant or Double Visage in: a human figure can be sensed in them, but never fully, leaving whoever is looking free to reconstruct it in their own way.

Monochrome: a painting with almost no colour, but never without a subject

Monochrome deliberately narrows the palette to a single colour, or to very close variations of one hue. It's often associated with abstraction — and that is indeed the most common case — but nothing stops a monochrome from staying figurative if a recognisable form still emerges within it. With no chromatic contrast to guide the eye, the material itself becomes the subject: the thickness of the paint, the grain left by a palette knife, the ridges and hollows that catch the light differently depending on the time of day. My canvas Blanc Immaculé, worked entirely with a palette knife in a range of whites and creams, works exactly this way: with no colour to tell a story, texture takes over instead.

Five things to look for to tell a painting's style at a glance

• —A subject you can name at first glance (a face, a body, a landscape) signals figurative painting, even in a stylised form
• —A recognisable shape that slips away the closer you look usually points to a semi-figurative composition
• —A palette narrowed to a single hue, with no colour cue to follow, points to monochrome work — abstract or not
• —Thick, knife-worked paint rather than brushwork shifts attention from colour toward relief and light
• —A literal title (a place, a named face) usually goes with figurative work; an evocative or abstract title (an emotion, a concept) usually goes with abstraction

I never choose a style before starting a canvas — it's the paint itself, as it dries, that decides whether a face should appear or dissolve.

Inside my studio: why I paint across three registers — abstract, monochrome and figurative

My work is usually described as bold, colourful geometric abstraction, rooted in my training between Buenos Aires and São Paulo — and that's true of a large share of my canvases. But the Full Collection, filterable by category, also reveals a more figurative side to my practice: faces that can be sensed in La Fiancée, Regard or Silhouette Rouge, a child's armour suspended between portrait and symbol in Armure d'Enfant, and the near-monochrome restraint of Blanc Immaculé and Brume. I don't treat these registers as competing directions, but as different tools in service of the same pursuit: finding, canvas after canvas, the truest balance between material, colour and emotion. You can explore all three families of work — colourful, monochrome and figurative — in the Full Collection, and see the exhibitions across France, Spain and Andorra where several of these canvases have been shown on the News page.