The first painting I remember seeing by Joe Andoe was a landscape, a tar-black field intersected by a blur. The image was just barely identifiable as a landscape by that horizontal sweep of light, strung with softly rounded forms hay bales. The painting brings to mind the often-told story of Tony Smith, a sculptor associated with the beginning of minimalism. In 1959 he took an evening cruise on the still-unfinished New Jersey Turnpike with three of his students. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done.
Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that.
1 Andoe's landscape looks pretty pictorial, topped off with a curvaceous flourish in the upper left corner. The paintings possess an economy and resolve traceable to the artist's graduate years in the late seventies at the University of Oklahoma, under the sway of Earth Art, Robert Smithson and Jimi Hendrix. In that time and place, stripped-down choppers exemplified an aesthetic since gentrified by minimalism, but driven initially by passion, not theory. Donald Judd's definition of American art has been quoted before in reference to Andoe, but it bears repeating. American art was born not out of a struggle against European art, but rather out of the vastness and uninterrupted space of the American landscape.