minimalism has its limits and not just in visual art - think Hemingway, and his sparse and stark sentences. In prose, it becomes staccato, which is fine if you're a war journalist writing about the incessant chatter of machine guns. Yeah, I think that's what happened to Hemingway...
but to return to visual art, abstraction leaves out connections - that's literally what it means - it's taken out of context, and sometimes the-thing-in-itself has an austere beauty that reminds us of something else - a sunset, or a lanndsacpe. Henry Moore in his sculptures experimented in pure form. When the city of Toronto placed his sculpture in the city hall square people were enraged. They kept asking, :"What is it?" ha ha ... they probably should have asked "How is it?" They were seeing it as a content rather than an expression of pure form. You come close to this by focussing on colour and texture apart from context. But art always forces us to look at things in a novel way a , so warm pastures may connote a pastoral setting or it may evoke a mood of blissful serenity. And I think the latter explanation comes closest to its meaning for me