Tension, forces, confinement and liberation are transcendental categories. In his signature works, Robert Motherwell paints ovals and thick bars that seem to express just these transcendentals, although they officially are Elegies to the Spanish Republic (the ovals are meant to be testicles of a bull, likely in a fight). They are breakthrough paintings, at any rate. An artist has managed to break through the wall and construct his own territory, or energy field. Another one of Motherwell´s series are the Opens: largely monochromous paintings with rectangular interferences that truly open stuff up and dynamise things (they would become more complex over the course of the years). Another transcendental category, very basic, probably that of encounter. Although Robert Motherwell had initially studied philosophy and likely was the most philosophically educated among the Abstract Expressionists, the metaphysics expressed in his paintings seems to come more tacit than in those of many of his peers. They are, probably, metaphysically less strong, bold and important than the paintings of Pollock, Rothko or Newman. But Motherwell was, above all, a supreme abstract painter, i.e. an artist. His intellectual purity expresses itself in the purity of his painting. He is a dweller on the threshold were art remains art and art becomes metaphysics. Or, he dwells in both of them territories.