Palaces, Pollock and Pixar

Inside Out, the recent Pixar movie, contains a scene I found overwhelmingly, hysterically funny. The action is set mainly inside the mind of Riley, an eleven year old girl, which is occupied by five figures personifying her emotions – ‘Joy’, ‘Anger’, ‘Sadness’, ‘Disgust’ and ‘Fear’. In the scene, two characters, Joy and Riley’s ‘Imaginary Friend’, take a short cut through a region called ‘Abstract Thought’, despite clear warnings that they are entering a dangerous zone. As they travel through it, the processes of visual abstraction transform them. First their anatomy is fragmented and re-organised in a non-naturalistic formation, they lose volume and depth, their outline is simplified, they become flatter and flatter. Just at the point of extinction they reach the exit and their figurative integrity is restored.

The scene is a highly edited and compressed account of pictorial abstraction’s evolution, familiar from university art history modules on the subject. What’s interesting is the panic that overtakes the two characters as they approach pure abstraction, and the relief they feel when they return to their familiar pixel-based environment. Even as an abstract painter, I felt it difficult not to share this sense of relief.

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