The Brooklyn Rail

The five large John Hoyland paintings recently on view at Hales Gallery showcase two major moments from the British painter’s early career. Created in the heady years between 1965-1970, the paintings date from a period of cultural cross pollination during which the artist maintained studios in both London and New York City. Though the appearance of Hoyland’s painting changed following his exposure to the art of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler—Olitski-esque ovals and cellular forms disappear from his work around 1965, with architectonic elements taking their place—the impact of American abstraction seems largely to have been one of affirmation rather than direct influence. That is: what he found in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting was not so much a pictorial system or method but rather an outlook that permitted him to follow his instincts toward expressive color and intuitive construction.

In his paintings of industrial Sheffield, made during Hoyland’s student years at the Royal Academy in the late fifties, foreground elements like walls and rooftops feature prominently, with background elements rendered more by suggestion than definition. The period of relatively derivative abstraction that followed in the early sixties, in paintings modeled after Frank Stella’s modularity and Jules Olitski’s awkwardly biomorphic forms, concluded after his initial trip to the US. In 3.12.65 (1965), the earliest painting in the show, the large foreground shapes of his urban scenes return, reconfigured as flattened planes of stained color, each one abutting the next, all five of them hovering near the bottom of the horizontal canvas. Two pairs of wedged shapes— dark teal and raw umber on the left side, dark red and green on the right—flank a central teal square; all of the shapes are darker than the light red canvas. The diagonal edges of the wedge shapes yield a tactile pictorial space that opens up more emphatically as one approaches the painting. Though all elements of the work seem tentative, searched for, suspended as if captured in motion, Hoyland’s subtle manipulation of real and pictorial space is deliberate, and 3.12.65 is a dynamic and complex painting.

In both 3.12.65 and the related 17.10.66 (1966), Hoyland developed a part-by-part, cumulative compositional style, more similar to that of his artist-colleague, sculptor Anthony Caro than the systemic and “one shot” paintings of Stella and Noland. Six bands of color roughly define the boundaries of the very open, dark green 17.10.66, creating two side by side square “U” shapes that meet in the center of the canvas. The vertical bands appear like pillars of light, with glowing edges and, atop each band, streaks of tapering color that flicker like a candle flame. At the bottom of the canvas, where the vertical and horizontal bands meet, they appear alternately stacked, layered, or woven, the latter two creating the slightest suggestion of space. Though economical and rigorous in formal terms, neither 3.12.65 nor 17.10.66 feels austere. You can sense Hoyland’s thinking in each painting, how he balanced his understanding of pictorial structure with a sensitivity to the weight and light of color.

Hoyland’s decisive encounter with the late paintings of Hans Hofmann in 1964 has been written about ad infinitum; like Morris Louis and Noland’s visit to Frankenthaler’s studio to see Mountains and Sea (1952), it’s become a canon event in the Color Field painting lore. Here again, though, Hofmann’s work seemed to catalyze tendencies already present in Hoyland’s art, or, at very least, the recognizable appearance of Hofmann’s influence was rather belated, becoming most apparent nearly five years later in densely textured works like the three remaining paintings in this show. Dating from late 1969 to late 1970, each contrasts well-defined rectangular elements with a painterly ground of spills and pours and spatters. 4.3.70 (1970) is the most complicated of these. Situated near the bottom of the painting is a thickly painted narrow red rectangle that extends vertically to just under the center of the canvas. Haloes of close valued green and maroon wrap around it, with further haloes of earthen reds continuing to emanate into the mostly acid green top quadrant of the painting. Two alternating effects issue from the work: one is a steep pictorial space that accelerates down and outward, as the paint increases in slickness and opacity; the other is a constructed light that emanates from the warmly toned green at the top and is then shrouded by those red haloes. Like a canopy of trees overhead, these haloes obstruct the light mostly but not entirely, with shocks of highlight (in the form of pale orange spatters and green drips) penetrating through. If the metaphors I have used to describe these works seem slightly obscure, it’s mainly because the paintings themselves are rather idiosyncratic, advancing a pictorial language with clear antecedents but few precedents.