Dartmouth professor and Guggenheim fellow Enrico Riley, however, provides an accessible and engaging body of work that is capable of changing inexperienced critics' minds.
"It's hard to talk about," Riley said. "When you live in a visual world, you tune yourself to see things in the silent world of vision. Sometimes it's hard to translate back into words."
This explanation is Riley's modest attempt to express the inspiration that has produced a burgeoning career and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
For 2008, the selection committee awarded 190 fellowships out of a pool of over 2,600 applicants. Notable past fellows include Ansel Adams, Vladimir Nabokov, Langston Hughes, and Henry Kissinger.
Riley's work, like many contemporary minimalist artists, evokes an abstract perception that is consciously created in the visual sense but often difficult to verbalize.
But Riley would be the first to clarify that, although selective with his medium, he is not in fact minimalist.
"Minimalism is a label in its original format used to describe a select few artists," Riley explains, as a "movement interested in emptying out everything."
Rather than reducing art to the sum of its physical components, Riley's work engages the viewer's perception.
There is no blank effect or statement in Riley's work, thanks to the build up of small brush strokes that accumulate in horizontal lines, suggesting the artist's hand at work.
There is also a luminosity that is not captured accurately in reproduction. What may seem like stark white staring back from a photograph is in fact a painted surface, alive and engaging in person.
As for subject matter, Riley explains that his paintings are "really about different temperatures of light -- color relationships that precede the conceptual or intellectual interest."
"There is a direct link between subject matter interests and physical manifestation of [the] work," Riley notes. Artists throughout history have interests that are invariably reflected in their work, as Riley's own appreciation of jazz music in particular manifested itself in his earliest graduate studies at Yale University.
His passion for music is evidence that the various white canvases of his early work, "Giant Steps," are far more than a mere rearrangement of wall space. Although artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Ryman have all used music as inspiration, Riley opts for a more direct link to musical notation.
He explained that his desire is to "deal with the hard facts of notation" and to literally see the beauty heard in jazz songs in the most literal form. Although the music can't be read, the euphonic loss is more than compensated by the visual effect. In this sense, "Giant Steps" is innovative in its movement and visual interpretation of a formerly aural art form. Riley's next challenge will be presented by the Guggenheim Fellowship. His two-part proposal includes studying Native American vision quests in the southwest United States and musical notations in medieval manuscripts at Oxford University. Both seek to further explore the innovative concepts of his earlier work.
Riley sees both of these endeavors as "two different ways for recording things, dreams and fixing sound in music." In the case of vision quests, Riley hopes to learn from the sacred practice. In terms of the medieval manuscripts, the blocky structure of the illuminations is more in tune with his previous workings with musical notation.
According to the Edward Hirsch, foundation's president, the Guggenheim Fellowship is "appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment." Considering his previous body of work and the proposal that earned Riley the fellowship, it is clear that Riley will continue to engaging the viewer in ways that contemporary or minimalist work never has before.
