Ryan Hoffmann

A love note to my eyes – not my foolish mouth

10 Mar 2026 – 28 Mar 2026

Painting on the Edge

Ryan Hoffmann is interested in the edges of things. In his series of Rorschach paintings, such as Wild Horse, fields of deeply saturated color flow outwards from a dense, dark center, before petering out in an ethereal glow at the painting’s outer boundaries. In Wild Horse this is a rich wine purple, while in A dream I had two weeks ago tendrils of a similar hue of purple cascade from the work’s extremities across a white ground. Wax and marble dust give these paintings a sense of body and presence. Luminescence in a Hoffmann painting is thus both pictorial and physical.

This aligns with artist Jo Baer’s understanding of painting as dealing in reflected light, a material fact as quantifiable as mass and thickness. She wrote in 1967, “Consider…colored paint a material which gives a particular, characteristic transmission of light via differential absorption and reflection. Call this reflected quality ‘luminance’ and measure it in millilamberts. This measure is as real and present as height, breadth, depth; and I find the phenomenon equally sumptuous and convincing.” In her minimalist paintings of the 1960s and early ’70s Baer emphasized edge by framing a blank white center with back borders lined with pastel colors that effloresced in the viewer’s sensorium. This effect was based in Baer’s understanding of the important role edges play in human perception. Survival and evolution has trained the human eye to scan the periphery first and locate the general impression of things so that quick decisions can be made, before later filling in details.

Hoffmann intuitively understands this as he seeks to create a sense of visual impact while also holding on to a romantic idea of the importance of experimentation, and even failure, in allowing the viewer access to the pictorial experiences he establishes in his paintings. Related to this is the question of reflection, which is most evident in Hoffmann’s elliptical light paintings, where it is a way of allowing the viewer’s presence to complete the work, as they become part of the composition and have agency over how it looks as they move around it. This is what captivates us in looking at gilded works like Moon Lit Water and Sun Lit Water. In this way the experience of the work is not fully determined by the artist. Because the viewer plays an important role in the work’s meaning it is effectively never closed or complete, always remaining open to the next viewer that encounters it. This is a radical position of openness that in some ways mirrors how we relate to other people, with all the attendant moral and even political resonances such encounters carry.

This occurs in Hoffmann’s two bodies of works in two ways. In the elliptical light paintings reflection is of the work’s surroundings, including bodies. While in the Rorschach paintings it is of the two panels, which—like Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal Factum I and Factum II—mirror each other, but not perfectly. The light paintings thus operate at the level of experience, while the Rorschach paintings operate at the level of interpretation. In the light paintings we feel what it means to radically require engagement with an other outside of ourselves, while in the doubling and open-endedness of the aptly-titled Rorschach paintings we are made to think through what this means. The resonances of both are something we carry with us long after we leave the exhibition space.

- Alex Bacon

Alex Bacon is an art historian based in New York.