JEANNE HOFFMAN
On the rim of the sunrise II, 2021 | On the rim of the sunrise I, 2021 | Net of whispers II, 2021
Acrylic on Italian cotton
520 x 420 mm Framed
Works-in-progress at the artist’s studio.
“The 'architecture' of the space (the painting) frames a symbolic constellation that is a space of continuous transformation: It is where the 'I' – the person engaged, whether artist or viewer – moves between movement and stasis, between separation and union, between what is real and what is possible, between the visible and the sayable. This contract between what is painted and what is not, between materiality and absence, brings to life a pictorial space that leaves room for the imagination. The artwork does not only testify to difference, but opens it into a region, an imaginary space, where paradoxes can, and do, co-exist; it is a productive space, a site for moments of insight.”
- Jeanne Hoffman
Hoffman sees paintings as places where language engages with the ineffable. Nonetheless, conversations take place as disparate realities invade one another’s territory. These are fertile spaces, creative through the multiple encounters and conflicts. From one territory, moves the unmitigated, primordial, ineffable; from another, the mediated, rationalised, observed – each drawn towards the other in this space of painting, first articulated through the artist’s fragmented collection of experiences, then continued through a series of poetic responses to these recollections.
“Dream window borrows its title from a 1992 documentary on Japanese gardens, referencing the conceptual and aesthetic devices of the ancient horticultural artform – that juxtapose outside with inside, order with wildness, materiality with absence, the stasis of framing (the captured moment) with perpetual movement, growth, change. These purposes run parallel to those of Hoffman’s practice, where her paintings are intended as places, spaces or stages upon which various gestures and encounters take shape.”
- Jeanne Hoffman
