THE PRIORITY BASED ON THE REJECTION OF STRUCTURAL ORDER, NARRATIVE CONNECTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES LEAVES NO MEANING OTHER THAN TO POINT TO THE ISOLATED STATE OF THE OBJECT-FORM, TO ITS ABSTRACT AND SIMPLIFIED DEGREE, AND TO ITS SOLITUDE. THE RHYTHMIC VISUAL EFFECT -THE AESTHETIC- CREATED BY A PATTERN BASED ON REPETITION SEEMS TO BE THE COUNTERPART TO AN ENDEAVOUR TO SEEK A STATE OF SELF-REFERENCE THROUGH MODULAR FORM AND PATTERN ARRANGEMENTS. THE REPETITION OF DECENTRALISED AND SIMULTANEOUS MASSES, OBJECTS AND IMAGES, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SURFACE THROUGH A GRID OR MODULAR FORM WITHIN A SEQUENTIAL ORDER AESTHETIC, IS CONSIDERED SIGNIFICANT IN ORDER TO ESTABLISH A RATIONAL LOGIC OR JUSTIFICATION FOR A MINIMALIST ATTITUDE AND MINDSET.

Minimalist artists relate painting to three-dimensional experimentation. This mode of formation, which carries artistic expression toward a transcendent arrangement, acquires an intensely modern character as a form of spatial organization, depth, balance, and composition rooted in holistic comprehension. In this respect, it diverges from geometric abstraction into a distinct territory, advocating a confrontation with plain formalism through a pursuit of relational equilibrium, alongside repetition, methodical positioning, and relationality.

Donald Judd, for instance, during the first half of the 1960s, engaged in a movement of repetition-based installation and order-making, arranging similar forms such as rows of wall-mounted boxes at regular intervals. This act also gains significance as an effort to neutralize the possibilities of meaning. Dan Flavin, in a comparable manner, continues his approach of resisting meaning through simple formal order by positioning light tubes in relation to the wall. Here, while the functional and semantic use-value carried by the repeated form as an object is bypassed, adherence to stacking order and formal discipline is left alone with a minimal aesthetic. It is therefore evident that these artists tend toward conceptualizing the immediate, abstract, singular, and distanced solitude of the presented or repeated object as a structural and discursive choice.

Donald Judd’s concerns relate to the evolution of pictorial language and image strategy, and to the transformation of painting into the dimension of object through a late modern turn. In the first half of the 1960s, this observation can be explained through a process of reduction and objectification, in which the flat surface gives way to shaped metal surfaces and curves animated by movement and image. Painting here, in Judd’s own terms, is transformed into a specific object or sculpture. (1) This can also be described as a critical abstraction, an investigation, and an aesthetic exercise. Judd’s wall sculpture composed of stacked boxes is, in essence, an endeavor that completes the sculpture through a dimensionality entered into with void, within a structure conforming to the conditions of order, discipline, and balance. Accordingly, it remains debatable whether the void surrounding the intermittent object arrangement produces a cultural spatial effect or lends a psychological dimension to the sculpture. For the interior spatial mediation of the elements constituting the sculpture, along with their material neutrality, appears to have settled for a visuality that, displaced yet faithful to repetition and rhythm, much as Morris himself perceived it, remains self-contained.