Unifying two approaches to painting that have preoccupied her for more than a decade, Jill Hoffman's new works combine the structure of a minimalist, geometric grid with the fluid, painterliness of Romanticism.

In a two-artist exhibit at the Katharine Butler Gallery -- she shares the space with Marina Preston, an equally restrained abstractionist -- Hoffman's images focus on the rhythms of parallel lines that can be contained within a small square.

Using pastels, graphite and handmade acrylics on paper, her lines and squares are repeated over the whole surface, as if a grid. Due to the physicality of the paint that is shaping the lines, texture and form create a weave of light and dark marks that are rhythmic and potentially infinite.

Each square has vertical or horizontal lines alternately repeated in the squares, like the pattern of a basket weaving. The rigor of her design is in its repetition.

Finished paintings can have either a square or rectangular format. Essentially, the grid is a device that illustrates the architecture of process: a classical organization of squares that support small, baroque passages of impasto painting.

Hoffman has arrived at a unique place in her work as a minimalist -- one of restrained expressionism: The design of the paintings, and their visual strength, is a consequence of the balance of the two influences on her.

The purity of her materials also is an important aspect of the work, especially the symbolism of her handmade acrylic paints and her attachment to heavy, 100 percent rag, acid-free paper.

The individualization of the handmade paint creates an intimacy for the artist with her medium that ready-made pigment doesn't carry. The liquidity and surface tension of the handmade paint as it moves over the paper is determined in its manufacture and is difficult to duplicate. The purity of the paper lends itself to concepts of longevity, and the atmosphere in which the paintings are made.

The artist says that music is essential to her process, and in fact, musical notation and its representation of harmonics is referred to in these paintings.

"Davey's Grey" is such an example -- a black-and-white acrylic on paper. The tempo of the painting's linear rhythms is created by emphasizing, or de-emphasizing, the density of its stark lines, their direction and degree of their curvature.

Concerned as it is with art's essential characteristics of form and design, minimalism is devoid of the overt individualistic aesthetic.

When this commitment to minimalism is awakened by an intuitive spirituality, as with Hoffman's recent work, elegant painting can be realized and should be seen as unmeasurable visual music.

April 11, 2004