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John Hoyland
22.8.66 1966
Acrylic on canvas, 223.6 x 365.8 cm
Private Collection © John Hoyland
20 May
–
24 September 2006, Tate St Ives
In several of these paintings a sequence of flat, abutting, clearly differentiated shapes occupies the foreground. The individual elements appear to lie on the surface, an impression reinforced by drips and passages where the paint has bled into the canvas. The shapes themselves are simple geometric forms: rectangles and horizontal, linear lozenges. The paintings are assertively structural. The arrangement of these forms, the relation of their edges and the way they touch create the visual argument. Formal considerations are highly significant. The elements that comprise the painting appear to constitute its subject. But this reading is true only to the extent that – for example – the opening notes of Beethoven's fifth symphony may be said to have formal interest. The musical analogy and the painting both comprise simple, repeated elements. But in both cases the formal component supports a much larger, expressive context.
