Entelechy
- Diamond Zhou
- 5 days ago
- 15 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
November 22nd, 2025
Before Aristotle defined entelechy, thinkers in the ancient world had already sensed that form carries an inward direction. They observed that things do not simply appear in the world; they move toward what they are meant to become. The seed contains the tree in its earliest grain. The river traces the path suggested by its own force. Even human beings seemed shaped by an interior blueprint rather than by external command. Destiny was not something imposed from above. It was something written within.
Aristotle eventually gave this idea a name: entelechy, the condition of having one’s end already held within oneself. Not potential in the modern, motivational sense, where everything is supposedly possible, but potential in the deep sense: that each thing contains the principle of its own completion. An acorn contains an oak the way an embryo contains an adult face. To become fully oneself is not to choose from infinite paths, but to follow the quiet, persistent path already inscribed in one’s nature.
This idea feels spiritual, because it is. It tells us that becoming is not arbitrary; it is meaningful. It suggests that the world does not float in random chaos but moves, with a kind of inner gravity, toward coherence.
Art, especially abstract art, is the cultural expression most attuned to this ancient notion. When we speak of an artwork “finding itself,” or a painting that “finally comes together,” we are invoking entelechy without naming it. When artists say the work began to tell them what to do, a sentiment repeated across centuries with astonishing consistency, they are describing the moment when their intention aligns with the artwork’s own internal necessity.
In abstraction this becomes even more vivid. Once representation is stripped away, what remains cannot be justified by narrative or likeness; it must justify itself. A Rothko arrives at its final state because nothing else would honour its internal balance. A Hilma af Klint painting moves toward its spirals and structures because the composition demanded it. And those demands, strangely, are not invented. They are discovered. The painter follows.
To think about entelechy is to return to this ancient story of inner direction and apply it to one of the most radical developments in modern art: the rise of abstraction, a practice that has always been less about non-representation than about revealing the deep structure of form itself.
Artists understood this long before philosophers took notice. In the early twentieth century, as the world lurched from industrialisation toward catastrophe, painters began stripping away the visible world to expose what they believed was more essential, not an external appearance, but an internal logic. Wassily Kandinsky wrote of “inner necessity,” a phrase that might as well be Aristotle translated through a modern mystic. For Kandinsky, a painting was only successful if it obeyed the spiritual forces that guided its creation. Colour had its own will. Lines had destinies. Composition, like a constellation, had to align with forces that pre-existed the painter’s awareness.
Paul Klee, whose notebooks are practically philosophical treatises, described the painter as someone who makes the invisible visible. He believed that every artwork grows like a living organism. A point becomes a line because it must. A line becomes a plane because that is the natural evolution of form. His images often look like embryonic landscapes, part map, part seedling, part diagram of forces assembling themselves. They feel less composed than coaxed into being.
Even Piet Mondrian, whose grids seem constructed with much austerity, was driven by metaphysical ambition. He saw geometry not as a system but as a revelation, a means to express the universe’s intrinsic order. His canvases do not present rigid discipline for its own sake; they enact a slow, patient purification, peeling away everything accidental to reveal what is necessary. His red, blue, yellow, and black are not colours but principles. His lines are not boundaries but axes of being.
To understand these artists through entelechy is to see abstraction not as an aesthetic rupture, but as a philosophical continuation of a very old logic: the belief that form has an inner life, and that the role of the artist is to help that life come into full realization. As modernism progressed, this idea returned in new guises. For some artists, entelechy was spiritual; for others, psychological; for others still, rigorously formal. But the through-line remains: the belief that the artwork contains its future state within its earliest gestures.
Consider Hilma af Klint. Her vast diagram-like works seem to arise from forces greater than the human hand. Spirals unfurl as though driven by cosmic mathematics. Shapes evolve like species discovering their ideal forms. Af Klint believed the paintings were given to her by higher intelligences, but even without accepting that metaphysics, one feels the presence of an interior propulsion, a teleology of colour and symbol. These works do not argue, they instead unfold.
Jackson Pollock, in a completely different language, embodied the same logic through movement rather than symbol. His drip paintings behave like organisms governed by physics and intuition simultaneously. The paint follows gravity and velocity, yet the final canvas has an uncanny unity, as though each thread of paint “knew” where it had to go. Pollock famously resisted the idea of randomness; he claimed that every line was a deliberate consequence of action. The painting’s form emerged from a relationship between control and surrender, a dance between artist and the latent order of the material world. Entelechy in paint.
Mark Rothko approached the matter from the opposite end of intensity. His soft, hovering rectangles appear simple, but their final configuration often emerged only after profound struggle. Friends who watched him paint recalled that he scraped down layers repeatedly, trying to find the work’s “breathing structure.” He did not impose a picture; he listened for it. The glow that emanates from the colour fields, that hushed radiance, feels like the resolution of a long internal argument. Each painting arrived at the point where the internal logic clicked, and nothing could be added or removed without breaking the spell, spelling the very essence of elegance.
Lee Krasner’s collaged abstractions, reveal entelechy in another way: through reconstruction. In her later works, she often cut up her previous paintings, even works she valued, and allowed the fragments to recombine into new wholes. What emerges in these collages is not chaos but an underlying coherence: as though the pieces always wanted to find one another. Krasner trusted that the fragments carried the seed of their future forms, and her task was only to recognize their gravitational pull.
In sculpture, the process of subtraction, carving away until the form emerges is a literal enactment of entelechy. Barbara Hepworth’s stone and bronze works feel as though the final shape was slumbering inside the material. She merely uncovered it.
There is a moment in the story of abstraction when a painter stops wrestling with the world outside and begins listening to the world within the work itself. This is the point where abstraction no longer derives from the visible, nor from its refusal, but from an internal order that emerges as the painting unfolds. Joseph Kyle worked from within this territory. His paintings did not chase the external world nor turn away from it. They arose from a different source, one that felt discovered rather than invented, as if the work were clarifying something already present in its earliest gestures.
Kyle described his paintings as expressions of “pure visual ideas.” The phrase can sound elusive, but it is accurate. These ideas cannot be translated into language without losing the essence that makes them visual. They cannot be paraphrased or described into being. They must take form through line, colour, interval, and the quiet force of internal coherence. For Kyle, the act of painting was not a means of illustrating ideas but a method of bringing them to completion. His work belongs to the lineage of Agnes Martin, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and other artists for whom form is not a construction but an unveiling.
James McGrath, writing in 1994, recognised this inwardness in Joseph Kyle’s practice. He wrote that “one works from the centre to the very edge, and finds beauty.” It is one of the most perceptive lines written about Kyle. His paintings genuinely do radiate from within, not as decorative symmetry but as a structural truth. They expand outward with a kind of quiet authority, each element placed where it belongs because the painting demands it. The work carries a sense of completion that does not feel imposed but achieved.
Symmetry is Joseph Kyle’s most misunderstood tool. To those encountering the work for the first time, symmetry can appear to be a formal device, an attempt at balance or harmony. But in Kyle’s hands it is not simply balance. It is the painting’s internal architecture. Symmetry gives the work its gravitational centre, the point from which all form emerges. It steadies the composition, not by restraining it, but by giving it a clear axis of becoming. Form grows outward from this point, unfolding with an inevitability that is felt rather than explained.
This is where entelechy becomes the key to understanding Kyle. Aristotle used the word to describe the condition in which a thing fulfils what it already contains in potential. An acorn becomes an oak not through invention but through the unfolding of its nature. Kyle’s paintings behave in much the same way. They move toward equilibrium with an inward pull, as though each decision leads to the next because the painting itself knows where it must go. This is not mysticism in a sentimental sense, it is a precise description of what happens when form is allowed to reach its fullest expression through necessity rather than force.
In the Entelechy Series, the paintings offer a sense of radiance that seems to come from within, not from light striking the surface. This internal glow is produced by Kyle’s way of defining and planning colours. The result is a structure that is both stable and alive, an image that holds itself together through the relationships of multiple planes. What appears simple from a distance becomes intricate as one approaches. What appears intricate becomes serene as one steps back. The work maintains harmony at both scales.
Kyle called this syn-optics, a term he coined to describe the way the viewer perceives multiple readings at once. Shapes align, re-align, and reveal deeper structure as the eye continues to look. The painting encourages a perceptual expansion in which separate elements become part of a single unfolding whole. The viewer is not presented with one fixed composition but with a field that reveals itself over time. This is the lived experience of entelechy. The painting becomes more itself as the viewer becomes more attuned to its order.
One of the remarkable qualities of Joseph Kyle’s paintings is that nothing feels arbitrary. Each stroke, line, and interval has a place that feels both necessary and inevitable. This does not produce rigidity. On the contrary, it produces openness. The work breathes. There is a sense of invitation, a sense that the painting allows the viewer to enter its logic without overwhelming them. Kyle achieved this by refusing ornament, refusing excess, and refining his language until only what mattered remained. His paintings are not minimal but essential. They strip away what is not needed so that what is needed can come fully into view.
The deeper one looks, the more one realises that Kyle’s Entelechy paintings are not simply formal expressions of forms, they are acts of recognition. They express a world in which form arises naturally, where clarity is achieved through patience, where order is not imposed but revealed. The paintings carry an intelligence that feels almost impersonal, not because they lack emotion, but because they participate in something larger than the artist’s individual will. They feel archetypal, as though they belong to an older visual vocabulary that Kyle rediscovered rather than invented.
This is perhaps why his paintings have such an unusual calm. They do not strain, argue, declare, or insist. They simply exist in a state of resolved being. They have reached their entelechy, the point at which nothing could be added or removed without breaking the unity of the whole. They do not seek transcendence. They embody it.
For the viewer, looking at a Kyle painting requires a certain adjustment. It is not the brisk glance one gives to decorative abstraction. It is a slower, more attentive form of seeing. One must allow the painting to unfold, which means relinquishing control for a moment and trusting that the work will guide the eye where it needs to go. This trust is rewarded. The painting becomes clearer, richer, more coherent with time. What first appears as precision gradually reveals itself as openness. The structure becomes an invitation.
In considering the Entelechy Series today, one senses how carefully Kyle cultivated this inward unfolding. Nothing in the work feels hurried. Nothing feels forced. There is a remarkable patience at the core of his practice, a willingness to wait for the painting to reveal its direction. This patience is not passive. It is active, attentive, and alert. It requires strength. It requires trust. It requires the humility to let the work become what it must become. Kyle understood that the painter’s task is not to impose meaning but to recognise it. His paintings show what can happen when form is allowed to arrive at its natural conclusion.
In the end, the Entelechy paintings return us to the ancient idea that form has an inner life. They invite us to consider that beauty arises not from novelty but from coherence, not from force but from attunement, not from ornament but from essence. To look at a painting by Joseph Kyle is to witness form fulfilling its own logic. It is to encounter a quiet but unmistakable intelligence. It is to stand before a work that has reached its fullest state. It is to recognise that this fulfilment is not only what the painting seeks but what the viewer seeks as well.
There are moments in the history of art when form reveals its own intelligence, when the artwork appears to grow according to principles that transcend geography or tradition. This is one of the quiet marvels of abstraction. Even in cultures that did not pursue non-representational painting in the Western sense, there are practices grounded in the belief that form carries an inner necessity. To consider entelechy across cultures is not to flatten difference but to recognise an ancient, shared intuition: that certain structures arise because they must, not because they are chosen.
Japanese aesthetics holds a principle that speaks with remarkable clarity to the idea of entelechy. It is the notion of yohaku, the charged presence of unfilled space. In this tradition, emptiness is not a void. It is a field of potential. The unmarked areas of the paper are as active as the ink, sometimes more so. They carry the energy of what has not yet taken form, the quiet pressure of becoming. In this sense, yohaku is the aesthetic expression of entelechy. It treats emptiness as something that guides the image from within, not as a simple absence waiting to be filled.
This can be seen in the work of Yokoyama Taikan, whose soft-edged ink landscapes dissolve boundary and form until the scene seems to rise naturally out of mist. His mountains do not sit on the paper as objects. They drift into visibility through the surrounding emptiness, as if the void itself were coaxing them into being. The same principle underlies the later abstractions of artists like Tawara Yūsaku, whose ink works allow the image to emerge gradually from expanses of untouched paper. The white field is not background. It is generative space. It holds the possibility of the image the way a seed holds the possibility of a tree.
For artists who work with abstraction, this is an invaluable model. It shows that clarity can arise from what is withheld, that meaning can appear through intervals, and that the force of a painting often lies in the quality of its silences. In the context of entelechy, yohaku offers a language for understanding how form emerges not through accumulation alone but through the disciplined honouring of potential. It reminds us that emptiness is not the absence of reality. It is the condition that allows reality to unfold.
The mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism express a similar trust in inner order. Built from the centre outward, these images are not depictions of cosmology but enactments of it. Every ring of colour and every surrounding element arises from a central point of stillness that holds the composition together. The mandala becomes an architecture of becoming. It teaches that form can grow through disciplined expansion, that unity does not negate complexity, and that the centre gives structure to the multiplicity around it. The work completes itself through the balance of these forces.
This is why these practices speak so directly to the notion of entelechy. Each demonstrates that creation is not an act of imposition but an encounter with the inherent logic of form. The painting, the pattern, the drawing, and the mandala all move toward coherence because coherence is inherent to their nature. They reach their fullest state through realisation, not invention. To look at these works is to witness form fulfilling its own destiny. It is to stand at the threshold where intention meets necessity, where potential becomes luminous, where the world shows how it wants to be seen.
Collectors often experience this long before naming it. When someone says a painting has grown on them, they are describing the gradual recognition of its inner necessity. A work that continues to yield insight or feeling over time does so because its structure holds more than the viewer can perceive at first sight. The artwork’s order becomes legible only through sustained attention, revealing its layers of meaning with the patience of something that knows its own completeness. The opposite is just as telling. A work that dazzles for a moment and then collapses upon repeated viewing usually reveals an absence of this inner logic. Spectacle cannot substitute for coherence. A surface without entelechy has no gravity to hold it together.
In a world so dominated by immediacy, entelechy stands as a quiet corrective. It asks us to honour the slow unfolding of form, the dignity of processes that cannot be accelerated. It reminds us that depth cannot be rushed and that the most meaningful works are those that reveal themselves over time. These works do not insist on their importance. They wait, and in waiting they cultivate a different kind of attention, they demonstrate that creation is not always an act of invention, often it is an act of listening. Every line, interval, and field of colour holds within it the whisper of its eventual form.
Perhaps this is the most beautiful dimension of entelechy. It suggests that within every beginning lies a promise. The first mark on a blank canvas, the first shift of colour, the first moment of looking at an unfamiliar abstraction, all contain the shape of what may come. Not predetermined but guided. This is the movement by which form becomes itself, by which intuition becomes structure, by which the artwork reveals the order already latent within it.
To think about entelechy in art is therefore not an academic exercise. It is an invitation to recognise that artworks are not objects but processes, each one a culmination of inward forces brought into clarity. It teaches us that meaning does not always announce itself. It gathers. It deepens. It arrives. When a work reaches its entelechy, the viewer reaches something as well. A place of recognition. A moment of alignment. A brief sense that the world, in its complexity, can still come to rest in a form that feels complete.
The work has arrived at its fullest self. And so, for a moment, do we.
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