Temporal Formalism
May 1, 2026 | by Matthew Herriot
Nearly every movement in twentieth-century painting was precipitated by a change in understanding of what a painting is. By changing what painting can be, artists changed what it could express. Picasso and Braque saw one-point perspective as detached from real-world experience; thus, they invented Cubism, a new way of depicting the figure through multiple, shifting viewpoints, closer to a durational experience of seeing. Surrealism treated painting as a means to access the unconscious, often allowing images to emerge outside rational control through techniques like automatism and unexpected juxtaposition, thereby shifting painting from depiction to the staging of psychic experience. Abstract Expressionism treated the canvas as a record of the artist’s physical encounter with the medium; this reframed painting as an existential act in which gesture and scale conveyed human presence within a precarious postwar world. Minimalism shifted attention from painting as illusion to the inherent properties of materials and real space, treating the artwork as an object and heightening perception of its tangible qualities. By redefining the conventions of painting, artists throughout Modernism generated new meanings that resonated with their historical moment.
Today, every artist claims a reinvention of painting. Press releases for exhibitions frame each artist as committed to a new understanding of what the medium is. Yet, after Modernism’s drive to map out painting’s possibilities, such reinventions involve increasingly minor distinctions. The major innovations of twentieth-century painting established the broad terms within which artists today still operate, making it difficult for contemporary painters to escape reference to twentieth-century artists who “did it first.”
Once you connect a contemporary painting to a past movement, you see its materials and mannerisms as quotations of other artists rather than as creative decisions that carry risk in this moment. This transforms the painting from a visually alive surface into an analysis of genealogy. You might think to yourself: “The painting in front of me is clearly influenced by a particular artist or period from art history, though its use of color or material is slightly different.” This process of analysis and classification is in direct conflict with aesthetic experience—by which I mean close visual observation of a work’s sensory features and their relations for their own sake—because once you name the thing you cease to properly see it.
The distinction between these two modes of attention is crucial to understanding what is wrong in contemporary painting. According to aesthetic philosopher Bence Nanay, aesthetic attention occurs when one attends to a wide range of an artwork’s properties at once—such as the relations between colors, forms, textures, and spatial organization. When looking at most ordinary objects, however, our attention is focused on only the properties relevant to some practical goal. Nanay illustrates this with a simple example: imagine you are being attacked by a burglar and, in searching for something to defend yourself with, you glance at a Giacometti sculpture. You are likely to attend only to the features that make it useful for defending yourself, while all other visual qualities recede. This is precisely the structure of attention that classification imposes on our experience of contemporary painting. Given the near-inevitability of stylistic reference, we often look at a contemporary painting with the goal of locating it within a familiar style or movement. This causes our attention to narrow toward only those key, defining properties that confirm or complicate that identification, while subtler particularities, such as any carefully refined color relationships or complex spatial organizations, go unnoticed. The impulse to classify prevents the distributed attention on which aesthetic experience in painting depends.
The crisis is not new; it was already felt by many painters by the 1950s. Artists initially solved the problem by making paintings that resisted classification altogether. Lucio Fontana sliced through the canvas, permanently rupturing it. Yves Klein departed from composition and picture-making completely, instead producing works that isolate the pure qualities of his own variant of ultramarine blue. In some cases, resisting classification meant leaving the canvas entirely. Dan Flavin pushed the medium into an expanded field. Through sculptural fluorescent light installations, he reduced painting to light, color, and spatial perception, while abandoning the physical canvas. These artists, among others, violated painting’s core historical properties to such an extent that traditional ways of interpreting painting no longer applied—such as questions of compositional balance, the organization of form, or the construction of an image. These works appear as singular things that must be encountered on their own terms, making stylistic analysis and the kind of classification that leads to perceptual collapse less likely.
Attempts to resist classification through rupture no longer work. The most fundamental ways to break painting already occurred decades ago, such that any new rupture today is immediately recognized as a reference to prior ones. Unable to escape historical references through disruption, artists instead rely on the language of radicality in press releases and artist statements, even when it is disconnected from what is visually evident in the work itself. As a result, disruption is invoked conceptually but no longer registers at the level of perception.
Critics have described this problem as the “death of painting,” which is always met with strong backlash. The art world revolts—they say that painting will never die because artists will always continue to paint. Both sides of this debate are misguided, but for different reasons. Painting is not dead because everything has been done before; it is in crisis because anything that can possibly be done is acceptable. Since painting no longer has binding rules, viewers no longer share a common set of historically grounded expectations. Without shared expectations, artists have nothing to disrupt. With no disruptions, viewers quickly recognize what they are looking at, and perception closes. This means that painters can continue painting, as they are doing today, but only with a trade-off: few paintings are actually encountered as art. In response, most contemporary painters settle for the illusion of novelty through material gimmicks (using unconventional surfaces or techniques) and inflated language (relocating meaning outside the painting by saying it is about something). The net result is an art world in retreat. Paintings today are experienced as decorative objects with external narratives attached to them. We repeat these narratives to justify making art that is so often perceptually inert.
Therefore, when critics say that painting is dead, what they are really registering is the breakdown of aesthetic experience. As contemporary painting increasingly triggers recognition of already-known styles, perception is flattened by classification. The problem, then, is how aesthetic experience can operate under conditions of historical saturation. Instead of searching for ways to address this problem, the postmodern art world largely pivoted toward the conceptual, treating “the aesthetic” as a suspect ideology. This shift was shaped in part by the rejection of earlier theories of aesthetic experience, most notably those of mid-century critic Clement Greenberg.
For Greenberg, aesthetic experience was inseparable from value judgment. A successful painting produces an immediate, involuntary sense of satisfaction by introducing a degree of formal surprise. Because this surprise depends on a viewer’s accumulated experience of prior art, Greenberg implied that those most attuned to the best new painting of the moment are better equipped to make accurate aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic evaluation thus takes on a quasi-objective character, in which some judgments carry more authority than others. By tying aesthetic experience to the recognition of the most significant recent developments in painting, Greenberg effectively reduced it to a form of historically conditioned competence, one that privileges certain viewers and pressures artists to align with dominant trajectories. This position has been criticized as elitist, contributing to broader suspicion that aesthetic judgment functions as an instrument of power and exclusion.
The art world’s response was to reject not just Greenberg’s account of aesthetic experience but the very act of evaluating art on aesthetic grounds altogether. What was lost in this rejection was the possibility of a more accurate understanding of aesthetic experience. The following offers a revised account of the mechanism by which aesthetic experience occurs in painting, explaining how it was produced throughout Modernism and how painting can remain perceptually alive today. This requires rethinking formalism itself.
Aesthetic experience does not depend on possessing “good taste” in any general or historically grounded sense. Rather, it arises through the viewer’s familiarity with an individual artist’s work—that is, across the viewer’s sequence of encounters with that practice rather than in relation to the broader trajectory of painting. This rewrites formalism from a historically grounded system of judgment to a temporal, experience-based process rooted in perception. Under these conditions, aesthetic experience is conditional and variable: a given painting may or may not generate it depending on the viewer’s prior encounters with that artist’s work.
Right: Milniades, 2018. Oil on linen, 47 1/2 x 55 x 12 1/2 inches.
Thus far I have portrayed repetition as painting’s fatal flaw, yet this account of repetition is incomplete. Under certain conditions, repetition can do the opposite: some artists establish and then undermine repetition to sustain aesthetic experience across multiple works. Consider Stanley Whitney’s practice—we know that every new painting will involve the same stacked, colorful squares. He builds a strong sense of anticipation by repeating a consistent visual motif. But rather than this repetition leading to immediate recognition, it can provide the necessary level of expectation for small deviations to disrupt and reopen perception.
Because Whitney usually paints his signature grid of squares in a wide spectrum of colors, often with a handful of intensely vibrant reds, his occasional shift towards cooler, less chromatic tones suddenly challenges recognition: Is this a true Whitney? Does it feel just as aesthetically pleasing, or does it fall flat? By deviating from his expected output, Whitney leads his audience to feel those risks in real time, asking them to make a judgment on whether the departure succeeds or fails. Hence, rather than simply registering the painting as a “type,” which would close perception, Whitney’s audience maintains a state of ongoing, active perception of the painting’s specific formal properties. In this sense, the expectation and surprise that Greenberg described is retained, but relocated from the level of art history to the level of an individual artist’s practice.
This distinction between repetition that closes perception versus repetition that reactivates perception can be demonstrated by comparing the works of Otis Jones and Ron Gorchov. Otis Jones’s paintings consist of roughly circular canvases stapled to layers of plywood of the same shape. Using a variety of muted and pastel colors, while shifting each painting’s curvature, scale, and depth from the wall, Jones’s work offers iterations on the same distinct visual language. But none of these variations venture far outside of his established habits of production; none of them risk displeasure. The first time you see one of his paintings, you might appreciate its novel construction or balanced use of color. The second time you might notice a slightly altered scale and proportions from the first. After the fifth or sixth time, you simply register a painting by a familiar artist, briefly note its signature formal qualities, and then move on without really seeing anything.
In contrast, while Ron Gorchov’s shaped canvases likewise appear more as objects than pictures, certain paintings of his dare to break the successful format he established. For instance, his symmetrical composition of two floating shapes is occasionally burst open, leaving only one distorted shape floating at an irregular axis. Other works test the refinement of his surfaces, as he sometimes allows thin, unfinished-looking washes of color to interrupt the resolved intensity of most other works. Each time Gorchov tests his own parameters, perception is jolted, forcing visual attention to “wake up.” The audience must update their idea of what a successful Gorchov painting looks like. By challenging expectations in this way, artists can continually evoke aesthetic perception.
Most painters find one compelling way of painting and then produce countless variations of it, like Jones did. All their variations roughly amount to the same experience each time—that of quick recognition, not aesthetic attention. Artists practicing what I will call “temporal formalism,” including Whitney and Gorchov, do not repeat within a familiar range of variation. They repeat the idea of a motif whose form is always changing, and thus manifests slightly differently in each work. By continually recalibrating the setting and breaking of expectation, temporal formalists renew and prolong perception of each painting’s formal properties. Aesthetic experience varies with the specific painting and each viewer’s prior encounters with the artist’s work, persisting irrespective of painting’s historical saturation.
The process at stake can be clarified through the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization, first articulated by Viktor Shklovsky: making familiar things strange in order to disrupt habitual perception and prolong the act of seeing. Traditionally, defamiliarization in painting operates at the level of representation. An artist takes an ordinary object, scene, or subject and presents it in a strange way, forcing the viewer to slow down and look again. But in contemporary painting, we are already accustomed to seeing endless distortions of the visible world, so defamiliarization no longer works at the level of what is represented. Temporal formalism relocates defamiliarization away from depicted content and onto the level of the painting itself. When an artist establishes a consistent visual language—so that their works become immediately recognizable as theirs—each painting begins to function, for the viewer, like a familiar object. Defamiliarization can then occur at a second order: instead of altering how something is depicted, the artist defamiliarizes their own established visual language by altering its expected structure. For example, once we have encountered a few of Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes, we do not just see a huddle of bottles and vessels but Morandi’s familiar abstract configuration; subtle deviations within that configuration can then carry the defamiliarizing effect.
Reframing defamiliarization in this way sharpens the distinction between artists who merely produce variations within a single style and those who practice temporal formalism. In both cases, repetition establishes a recognizable visual signature. The difference is that temporal formalists actively defamiliarize that identifiable signature to reintroduce perceptual tension. By contrast, artists who remain within predictable iteration always allow recognition to come too easily, causing perception to settle almost immediately.
From this perspective, temporal formalism does not depend on viewing an artist’s work in strict chronological order. It only requires a baseline familiarity with the artist’s established visual language, enough to register when it has been altered. Once that baseline familiarity exists, any work can produce a defamiliarizing effect, regardless of when it was made. You might first encounter the mature paintings of Ron Gorchov, where his paired, floating forms appear stable and fully resolved, and only later come across earlier works in which those forms emerge from a looser, more fluid field of shapes. Rather than understanding this as a precursor to his later work, you experience something more perceptually immediate: Gorchov’s familiar motif rendered suddenly unfamiliar. The expected configuration has been disrupted, even though the temporal sequence has been reversed. This reversal demonstrates that defamiliarization, as it operates within temporal formalism, is not tied to the linear progression of an artist’s practice but to the viewer’s own sequence of encounters that build and disrupt familiarity.
This perspective on defamiliarization also explains why a complete break from an artist’s established visual language does not generate the same level of aesthetic attention. If a painting bears no recognizable relation to prior work, it cannot function as a “familiar object made strange,” and the specific tension that sustains aesthetic attention dissipates. For this reason, artists can shift their methods across their career while still practicing temporal formalism within particular bodies of work, as in the abstract paintings of Philip Guston in the 1950s or the Ocean Park series of Richard Diebenkorn, where continuity and disruption operate together to sustain perception.
Using temporal formalism as a framework for understanding aesthetic experience is supported by recent research in cognitive science. In their 2011 paper “Putting Reward in Art,” Van de Cruys and Wagemans argue that aesthetic pleasure arises precisely from this dynamic: a painting establishes strong expectations—often through repetition or familiarity—and then introduces a violation that produces a “prediction error.” This error must be neither too small nor too large. If the work is entirely predictable, perception becomes automatic and unrewarding; if it is too unpredictable, the viewer cannot resolve it and disengages. The optimal case lies in between, where the viewer initially experiences the prediction error as a form of resistance, and must exert some effort to reconcile the discrepancy. The eventual reduction of that prediction error generates a sense of reward. Both the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization and this account of prediction error locate aesthetic experience in the disruption of an established pattern rather than in any static property of the work itself. Through this lens, artists practicing temporal formalism effectively construct and modulate the viewer’s expectations from one painting to the next, calibrating deviations so that each work demands renewed perceptual engagement.
Temporal formalism clarifies how aesthetic experience operated within Modernism’s drive toward reinvention, and, in doing so, how it remains possible under conditions of historical saturation. If aesthetic experience depended on each artist breaking from a set of expectations defined by prior art—as in Greenberg’s account—then why do past historical works continue to produce aesthetic experience today, in a new context? We experience historical works aesthetically not because we recognize their formal achievement in hindsight, but because those artists were simultaneously setting and breaking conventions within their own practices. A visit to the Musée Matisse in Nice, France, demonstrates this. As his work moves from his earlier paintings through his interior scenes in the south, then to his larger, flattened canvases, and finally to his paper cut-outs, each distinct phase establishes its own visual language and internal set of expectations, which are tested and disrupted within each phase. Viewers arriving without an art-historical background still experience these disruptions in the present moment of looking. That is how work made over a century ago remains perceptually alive. However, temporal formalism does not require an extensive museum visit or encyclopedic knowledge of an artist’s work to operate. A few encounters, whether in a single exhibition or scattered across time, are enough to build the familiarity on which defamiliarization depends.
If temporal formalism describes something real, then the question becomes why it hasn’t yet been acknowledged. Part of the answer is economic. A gallery’s program and the livelihoods of dealers and curators depend on the consistent output of recognizable artists. But there is little incentive to distinguish between recognizability maintained through routine variation and recognizability that endures through deviations, even though only the second produces aesthetic experience.
A second reason is that temporal formalism can be difficult to identify. Even the framework’s exemplar painters—such as Richard Diebenkorn or Robert Ryman—do not always achieve it, and when they do not, their work can be hard to distinguish from iterative variation. Moreover, the formal sensibilities of artists practicing temporal formalism vary so widely that there appears to be no common denominator. Alex Katz’s work is considerably different from Agnes Martin’s, for example. This makes it easier to conclude that each artist simply pursues an individual vision. It is harder to identify the condition that generates perceptual reward across such distinct practices. But this variability is, in fact, a strength of the framework. Temporal formalism prescribes nothing about what a painting should look like. It only requires a recognizable formal language, combined with a willingness to disrupt it. This is less a directive than a description of what the best painters already know intuitively.
The deeper resistance to recognizing temporal formalism, however, is institutional. As aesthetic-based theories of painting became unfashionable in the latter half of the twentieth century, art criticism moved away from evaluative judgment toward descriptive, contextual readings, thus avoiding hierarchies of taste. Temporal formalism reintroduces an evaluative dimension that cuts against more than fifty years of institutional consensus, even though that evaluative dimension is grounded in individual encounters rather than historically conditioned expertise. It is telling that the most direct research in this area has come from outside the art world. It comes from philosophy, in Nanay’s work on aesthetic attention, and from cognitive science, in Van de Cruys and Wagemans’s account of prediction error. Meanwhile, painters have continued to practice it implicitly, indifferent to whether criticism supplied a theoretical framework.
Temporal formalism ultimately reframes the terms of painting’s supposed crisis. Critics who declare painting dead are responding to the collapse of historical novelty as the engine of aesthetic experience. But painting’s capacity for aesthetic experience was located elsewhere all along, in the viewer’s own sequence of encounters with a particular artist’s practice: the building of familiarity followed by moments of defamiliarization. By shifting the relevant axis from historical knowledge to individual encounters, this framework identifies the conditions under which a painting is more or less likely to produce aesthetic experience. In doing so, it explains why most contemporary paintings fall flat while some retain aesthetic vitality despite the exhaustion of historical novelty. Naming this mechanism clarifies what the best painters already do in practice, and what criticism, in retreating from aesthetic experience, lost the language to articulate.
About the Author:
Matthew Herriot is a British artist living and working in Chicago.
mattherriot.com
@matthew_herriot