“Do you think it concerns me that a particular picture of mine represents two people? Though these two people once existed for me, they exist no longer. The ‘vision’ of them gave me a preliminary emotion; then little by little their actual presences became blurred; they developed into a fiction and then disappeared altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems. They are no longer two people, you see, but forms and colors: forms and colors that have taken on, meanwhile, the idea of two people and preserve the vibration of their life.”

— Pablo Picasso

As you look at the portraits of these formerly real people, who now exist to us only as forms and colors, consider that to some extent, in terms of appearances, that’s what we are to each other now as living creatures – forms and colors. If you’re with someone now, give their form a hug.

Source: Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory:  1900-1990.