The sea

The sea is a special kind of medium for modernism, because of its perfect isolation, its detachment from the social, its self of self-enclosure, and, above all, its opening onto a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation.

Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 2