It commandeers a formal argument to which, abruptly, the shapes become futile objections. The shapes project will. The ground maintains knowledge. The ground has the stronger case going in and, after the shapes filibuster, prevails in the end. Painting and painted ground are essentially one, as Greenberg correctly taught while preaching, fanatically, an elimination by painters of anything incidental to that recognition.
Art is incidental to life, which is incidental to the universe.
We live and breathe until we don't any more, and meanwhile our eyes dart about our environment, hungry for stimulus. The best abstract painting, like Stephan's, rests its legitimacy on a persuasive identification of living with looking. Abstraction aims to intensify this transaction's uncanniness, bending consciousness back on itself to make thought the material of thought and feeling the object of feeling. Pleasure is indispensable here, or else our encounter with abstract painting would be an ordeal. But there are values that supersede pleasure.