"My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature"
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Hofmann declares an ambition that collapses the gap between what a painting depicts and what it does. Pulsation, luminosity, and openness are not subjects but energies the canvas should generate. Rather than imitating light, he wants paint to become light, an optical and emotional phenomenon produced by the interplay of colors, edges, and fields. The language of mystic light points to a spiritual dimension akin to early modernist aspirations, yet his mysticism is grounded in craft: the vibration of complementary hues, the tension between warm and cool, the push and pull that makes a flat plane breathe.
Open surfaces suggest an all-over, nonhierarchical field where no single focal point dominates and forms seem to continue beyond the frame. This openness keeps space active, elastic, and alive, countering the sealed, illusionistic windows of traditional painting. Pulsation arises from contrasts of saturation and value, from brushwork that accelerates and decelerates, from rectangles and slashes that press forward or sink back. Luminosity comes from color relationships that cause the eye to mix light internally, so the canvas emanates rather than reflects.
The appeal to deepest insight into life and nature anchors abstraction in experience. Nature, for Hofmann, is not a catalog of objects but a matrix of forces, rhythms, and growth. Painting, then, should embody the energies of becoming and change rather than mirror appearances. That stance reflects his formation in European modernism and his role in American Abstract Expressionism, where color and gesture carried existential weight. In his writings such as Search for the Real, he argued that inner necessity guides formal invention; here, that necessity is the felt truth of life translated into spatial dynamics.
The statement is both aesthetic credo and pedagogical directive. It asks painters to build surfaces that act, to orchestrate color so space expands and contracts, and to pursue a light that is not depicted but discovered through the materials themselves.
Open surfaces suggest an all-over, nonhierarchical field where no single focal point dominates and forms seem to continue beyond the frame. This openness keeps space active, elastic, and alive, countering the sealed, illusionistic windows of traditional painting. Pulsation arises from contrasts of saturation and value, from brushwork that accelerates and decelerates, from rectangles and slashes that press forward or sink back. Luminosity comes from color relationships that cause the eye to mix light internally, so the canvas emanates rather than reflects.
The appeal to deepest insight into life and nature anchors abstraction in experience. Nature, for Hofmann, is not a catalog of objects but a matrix of forces, rhythms, and growth. Painting, then, should embody the energies of becoming and change rather than mirror appearances. That stance reflects his formation in European modernism and his role in American Abstract Expressionism, where color and gesture carried existential weight. In his writings such as Search for the Real, he argued that inner necessity guides formal invention; here, that necessity is the felt truth of life translated into spatial dynamics.
The statement is both aesthetic credo and pedagogical directive. It asks painters to build surfaces that act, to orchestrate color so space expands and contracts, and to pursue a light that is not depicted but discovered through the materials themselves.
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| Topic | Art |
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