Huh?

I was flipping through Salvador Dali's "Diary of a Genius" - was he crazy? Perhaps. Genius, probably. I came across a short entry: "We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have served for that: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art." What does that mean? How can abstract art serve our thirst for concrete images? Or am I reading it wrong? I do a lot of abstract art. Perhaps he means that like Picasso, sometimes the way to most purely represent a 3-D image on 2-D space is to paint it from many different angles and abstractly, thereby boiling down a thing's essence and capturing it on canvas. Hmmm. Are the two mutually exclusive? Conundrum.