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SIGNS NO ONE TAUGHT US

A charged abstract composition filled with vivid color, obscured figures, crossed-out symbols, sweeping gestures, and marks that seem to belong to a language still being formed.

Medium
Mixed media on canvas — acrylic paint, drawing media, gestural marks, and dimensional texture
Dimensions
20 × 20 × 0.75 in
Year
2023
SKU
RBZ-SNOTU-73
Orientation
Square
Framing
Unframed
Signs No One Taught Us considers how people learn to interpret a world without ever receiving a complete key. Across a field of electric yellow and green, black gestures collide with pink, blue, gold, violet, white, and red. Pale figures emerge only partially before being covered or interrupted. Crossed symbols appear throughout the composition like warnings, rejected answers, private coordinates, or instructions whose meanings have been lost. The painting moves between spontaneous expression and deliberate obstruction. Broad strokes create speed and force, while smaller marks, scratched lines, repeating symbols, and heavily textured passages slow the eye down. Nothing resolves into a single explanation. Instead, the viewer is left to navigate an invented visual language using intuition, memory, and personal association.

Beyond the object

The record behind the work.

The work

Story

Before language becomes language, it is repetition, gesture, reaction, and recognition. We learn which expressions mean safety, which silences mean danger, and which invisible boundaries should not be crossed—often without anyone explaining the system.

Signs No One Taught Us imagines those unspoken instructions as a damaged visual code. Figures appear within the noise, but they do not provide answers. Symbols are presented and immediately canceled. Every apparent direction produces another uncertainty.

The work asks whether we are reading the world as it is or merely applying meanings we learned without realizing we had learned them.

The making

Process

The composition was built through successive layers of saturated color, forceful black gestures, smaller drawn marks, pale figurative shapes, and textured applications of paint.

Areas were added, covered, scraped through, redirected, and allowed to collide. Broad diagonal movements established the painting’s momentum, while repeated crossed symbols and fragmented figures introduced a loose visual vocabulary. Thick passages of pink and darker paint rise from the surface, contrasting with thinner washes, exposed canvas texture, and quick linear marks.

The finished work preserves both the immediate decisions and the corrections that followed them.

For the collector

Collector Notes

This piece has a bold, energetic presence, with neon color carrying from across a room and layered details revealing themselves at closer range. Its square format gives the composition stability while the gestures inside it remain intentionally unsettled.

The work can be read as urban, psychological, symbolic, or purely abstract. Its unresolved figures and recurring crossed marks allow the collector to develop a personal interpretation rather than inherit a fixed explanation. It is particularly suited to a space that can support intense color, visual movement, and sustained ambiguity.

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