Flemming Hoff's works refuse art historical reflections and long, theoretical analyses. They are works that speak to the senses through a special materiality and call for touch and smell. Works that are based on sensations, and which only seem to suffer harm when they are wrapped up in words.
His latest series of paintings are physically larger than what an ordinary person can grasp, and as a viewer you easily disappear 'into them'. They are built up of monochrome color fields laid layer upon layer on the canvas. The geometric shapes and simple compositions reveal a kinship with American color field painters such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman, but the palette is more graphic-ascetic and Hoff's use of toothed trowel leaves grid-like traces in the upper color surfaces, whereby deeper layers emerge and 'disturb' the meditative order. Dark shadows dance under a lemon yellow, red or white surface, rising as elegiac timbres to fade away in the next moment. White, analog ‘noise’ rises and falls in strength. Drops of paint run down the canvas in places, leaving streaks behind them.
The many layers of oil and acrylic paint interacting with each other create the foundation for vibrating, kaleidoscopic structures that give the painting’s non-figurative expression a special tension. The works speak their own quiet language that piques the viewer’s curiosity.
Flemming Hoff is a self-taught visual artist. He has a past as an architect, and this may be part of the explanation for the texture and materiality that one experiences in his works.