| By Kevin Costello, Correspondent SARASOTA --
Jill Hoffman's minimalist paintings at the Katharine Butler Gallery offer a quiet
surprise: paintings about the art of painting; in effect, meditations on the practice of
simply holding a brush.
But she doesn't stop there. While for Hoffman and the
minimalists of her generation the emotional force of simple shape and color remain
central, she has kept the language alive by introducing fresh ideas.
Hoffman is among the best-trained and consistently
experimental minimalists in Sarasota. Active in the San Francisco Bay area in the '70s and
early '80s, her approach to painting was strongly influenced by Tom Marioni, a pioneer of
conceptual art. She began as a photo-realist, then switched to molding large, latex
bas-reliefs of floors, mounting them on walls -- essentially faux-realist textured
wall-hangings.
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What remains stylistically with her from that
time is the emotional content of organized, deliberate texture.
Minimalism is about organization: pure line, form and
color. It's an abstract style that uses mathematical order and geometric simplicity to
achieve beauty. Minimalism asks the viewer to respond to and enjoy order before the
sensual appeal of the medium. That order, often using mathematical-like map coordinates,
establishes a logical support -- a clear space into which artists insert thoughts and
emotions.
No longer as influential as it was 20 years ago, minimalism
is still a viable style of art. In contrast, Expressionism, both in art and popular
culture, continues unabated and unabashedly along its rhetorical path.
But minimalism, philosophically, counters this noise and
chaos with cool intellectualism, expressed in the form of a grid. And with her
polychromatic and monochromatic grid paintings, Hoffman extends minimalism by reducing its
scale. Earlier minimalist painters sought the heroic voice in large canvases. Hoffman uses
a smaller grid (1 inch by 1 inch), a device that combines the calm of order with a
romantic attachment to delicacy and the color and viscosity of paint.
This produces authentic art -- an art committed to the
larger, serious concerns painters have for the history of visual ideas.August 8, 2003 |
