These works share many visual characteristics, exploring the fertile territory of the unconscious that Freud and others had opened for 20th-century artists: a rich array of surreal forms that move between the representational and the symbolic.

WSJ: Becoming Mark Rothko | The Decisive Decade | Columbus Museum of Art

Artists, he says, rely on our proneness to visual illusions arising out of the fact that all perception involves unconscious inference, as when a two-dimensional retinal image is translated into a three-dimensional perception.

WSJ: Book Review: The Age of Insight