Editing Openai/691871e9-61d8-8006-bf05-8aa974c604bb (section)

===== Self-Referential Surface =====

Ultimately, the painting succeeds, in Greenbergian terms, because it remains self-referential. It tells the viewer: “This is a painting first, a landscape only incidentally.” The content never overwhelms the form; instead, the form produces the content. Purcell’s “Moonrise” becomes a sum of interactions—color boundaries, overlapped transparencies, edges, textures—affirming its identity as an autonomous object in the lineage of modernist abstraction.

In this reading, the moonrise is not a scene observed, but an event enacted on the surface, where the language of painting generates its own logic, independent and complete.