"... The surfaces of Moore's paintings have become significantly more varied and articulate, and the surfaces that those paintings depict have become equally disparate. Yet the sense that Moore is dealing with abstraction, and that these surfaces are eloquently warning us that their undeniable expressiveness can never be redeemed for an expression of anything in particular, could hardly be stronger. On might suggest that, just as "primitives" are said to believe photographs steal the souls from the photographed bodies, Moore's paintings skim the surfaces of the bodies they depict-- but that, in contrast to photographs , they leave the souls intact, safe in the shelter of unknowability. Allegorically, they present the surface of the body as disclosing, above all, that something remains incommunicable and untitled."
Allegories of the Surface, Barry Schwabsky