Gesture is singular, highly subjective and can become a mere performance, unless of course the artist takes Gerhard Richter's stance and in his/her abstracts obliterates all mark making with heavy impasto paint, squeegeed and scraped onto the canvas, annihilating authorship and relying on that "chance" outcome for mark making.
Squeegee Abstract Painting Allan Storer
Now the canvas becomes the scene or stage with no known finale. If we are looking for "meaning" it is a mystery, for its audience to resolve,
OR
paradoxically and to play "devils advocate" is it more the "flatness" of the painting surface that is the essential quality of an abstract painting which appeals to myself. The fluidity of highly thinned oils, acrylics or household paints, their physical aspects, colour and weave of canvas.
I'm thinking of Rothko's multi thin glazes now and also Pollock, allowing paint to flow in his drip paintings, expressivity nullified and as with Richter authorship suppressed.
Large abstract structures of transcendental work, their metaphysicality pointing to another world or mere objects focused on their own materiality and this world is the only one we have.
Whatever abstraction remains ambiguous, a paradox.