Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. Maurice Denis
I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it. Helen Frankenthaler
A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. Donald Judd
Take a relief. You draw it, you carve it out. Later you build it up from a flat surface. There is no other way to do a sculpture - you either add or you subtract. Urs Fischer
..the flat surface of a perfectly calm ocean [which] disturbs us.. ..by all the unknown that is hidden in the depth. Giorgio de Chirico
There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. Katherine Dunn