Jenny Brillhart, a Miami-based artist, explores the abstract structural values of reality. To achieve the cool purity of abstraction, her real-scapes must be devoid of particulars, and people. Her interest in shapes against each other, nuanced color, thin lines across the page recall artists like Rackstraw Downes and other pared-down realists (whose names are escaping me momentarily...). However, Brillhart and Downes appear to be after a different set of aesthetics: he, enquiry into space and structure; she, enquiry into two-dimensional composition.
I see Brillhart's interest lying in the achievement of an actived rectangle, read on the same two-dimensional plane. Compositionally speaking, one can conjure Piet Mondrian, arrangement of squares. That the squares stand for theosophical functions adds the second-layer of meaning to Mondrians work. Brillhart's second meaning maybe a statement on the cold, bleached world of Miami. Or, maybe at the moment it's just squares.
