Eyewitness is an exhibit meant to confirm that Modernism is alive and well: art-making immersed in a visual and pictorial language, 

aspiring to convey meaning with ancient tools. Embedded in these works is a struggle to clarify purpose and the urge to ignore the 

cheeky posturing of the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

John Battle and Virva Hinnemo carve out ample space for themselves by remaining immersed in a classical syntax. Battle endeavors like the blacksmith Hephaestus forging weapons for the gods on Olympus. He is labor-intensive, smart, and hands-on. For Battle, there is absolutely no aesthetic embellishment: imagine Russian constructivism welded to hard-boiled eggs and beets on pickled herring: tradition served up straight with a whiff of whimsy. Battle is unfailingly anthropomorphic, low technology, and warm-blooded. He builds from the inside out with measured weights and a startling economy of means. His is the act of seeing while creatively responding in the moment, retaining the air and light of his crafted vision. Battle’s singular imagination aspires to be humane, intimate, and deeply felt; his metaphorical suggestions are joined in the precise force required at every turn, making for exquisite anatomy.

Virva Hinnemo makes abstract paintings simultaneously factual and fictional. Visceral blocks of paint suggest landscapes, trees, and air but what counts is the in-betweens. Drawing with color is an act reserved for the very few, like de Kooning. Hinnemo does just that. The pitch of her favorite chunky forms contains all the details with paint applied thick and spicey. At first, her work is quietly confrontational, then gradually drifting, pausing, and finally establishing itself as entirely material. Lavender, pinks, pale blues, earthy browns, and ochres orchestrated vividly, observed from the outside. Nordic painters are consumed with their trolls, myths, and legends, always set against a powerful Lutheran backdrop: white Moomins populate the world with their hippopotamus-like snouts as they engage in lively but humble activities. Subdued and enigmatic is the proverbial lesson of the north; a mournful edge touches Hinnemo, somber and alone.

I’m housecleaning, liquidating any possible excess as I try to squeeze out every trace of lyricism, but purity escapes me as every modulation or cadence reads even larger than anticipated. The image is unvarnished, exposed like bark on a tree. A skin of paint retains, contains, the mileage traveled. After forty-six years and counting all the steps I’ve taken, I know Ad Reinhardt was right:

The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art, and everything else is everything else. Art as art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.

~George Negroponte October 2021