Andoe often locates his frequency in the shapes of his Tulsa youth. For a while he didn’t like to talk about where his imagery came from, not from embarrassment or secrecy or posturing but because he didn’t think it was important. Like the lights and cables around a movie set: ‘you pan away from the set, it kills the magic.’ But people like knowing these things. His subjects aren’t riddles. He thinks of them as colours that he dips into.

Maybe that moment in your life feels true because your frontal cortex is still opened, like a record skipping. He says his record skipped when he was 18, stoned, sitting in his car on a dirt road at the edge of town, which is when he realised how beautiful everything is. There’s no irony in this realisation, which is what his paintings are like, too: dry, straight on.This is an abbreviated presentation: four recent paintings. When you put on a show this succinct, something funny happens: the power of each painting expands. There’s an alchemy of effort. Or as Joe says: you get your hit.

Four paintings don’t provide much cover. There’s no space at all to hide, which suits just fine. The spareness of the imagery becomes amplified. The hum fills the room. These paintings don’t form a deliberate body of work, unless you consider the sweep of Andoe’s project a distinctly American one, unified less by intention than by mood.

The figurative focus is a kind of feint. Not a trick, exactly, but also not the point. Andoethinks of them as abstractions, shapes lifted from the material plane and reformed, a bodygiven new purchase. Andoe’s technique is to apply a thick layer of oil paint to his surfaces,marking the outlines, and then wiping away the wet paint. The result reveals the dyed grainof the fine canvas linen underneath, a textural thrust that joins them to Americanminimalist painters like Ryman and Kelly.

There’s a painting of a tree trunk that’s more of the suggestion of a tree trunk, a silhouette, half there and half not, sturdy but letting the static in. It surges up the canvas, dialling the tuner back to AbEx’s muscular gestures. Barnett Newman described his paintings as pullingExcalibur from the stone, a gentle hand finessing the composition into existence. Andoe’s Excalibur resides in a common sturdiness, sublime in its plainness. That’s the real trick: persuading the image out of its absence while letting its absence remain. You can feel their hum reverberating, rushing back at you, head on.

Press release courtesy Almine Rech. Text: Max Lakin, critic and writer.