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From essay accomopanying the show by Joao Ribas:
"The simplicity of minimalist art belies a radical agenda. Its stripped-down, reductive language-seemingly benign-in fact unsettled most of the conventions of modern art. "What you see is what you see," painter Frank Stella once famously said of the minimalist aesthetic, yet the laconic description underplays its vital role in contemporary art.
Initially focusing on sculptural form, minimalism proposed a literal, almost industrial definition of art. A minimalist artwork was first and foremost an object in three-dimensional space; a box, a shelf, an aluminum square. Such calculated neutrality antagonized the art preceding it and led to a rethinking of what could be conceived as a painting or a sculpture.
The ongoing impact of this questioning is clear in today's best reductive art. The minimalist ethos has become a way for painters to purge abstraction of metaphor or allusion and refocus it on formal elements; flatness, monochromatic color, serial form, and bare geometry - in short, qualities that stress immediate visual impact. Minimalism shows this tendency converging with a renewed interest in abstract painting, demonstrating how complex ideas can be enveloped in reductive forms. With an emphasis on structural clarity and the literal qualities of the medium, such work is often closer to a painted object rather than a traditional painting."
For Matthew Deleget, see http://www.matthewdeleget.com/
For Rossana Martinez, seehttp://www.rossanamartinez.com/
