Infinite Games

Infinite Games: Positional Abstraction & Material Play

A recent game of chess against Matt Demers got me thinking about how the ways in which he and I, as painters, solve problems in our work is a lot like how we solve problems in chess. Like painting, chess is a practice of creative visual problem-solving. The work in Infinite Games isn’t chess-themed—and it isn’t all painting. But I’m of the belief that an analysis of the studio practices which yielded the works in the show benefits from a soupçon of chess and some light game theory. Infinite Games is a show about the seven artists approachto solving problems.

Matt Demers, Jessica Gandolf, Hannah Stoll, Meg Hahn, Jimmy Viera, Eleanor Anderson, and Allison McKeen share a common affinity for visual logic and game-design. Whereas some artists resolve a composition—editing and adjusting to complete a work, these artists solve a composition, like one might solve a puzzle, operating within a set of self-designed rules. For artists like Jessica Gandolf and Hannah Stoll, these rules shift and evolve from piece to piece. For artists like Eleanor Anderson and Jimmy Viera, these rules shift with different series of works.

Chess is what James P. Carse refers to as a finite game in his 1986 text Finite and Infinite Games. These artists, however, are playing what he describes as an infinite game—one in which the players change, the rules shift, and the goal of the game is not to win, but to continue play, infinitely. They create the rules of their game, see how far they can stretch them, and then make new rules. Ad infinitum. In the studio, each of the artists is a game designer with a habit of lingering with their works, asking not “how can I finish this piece?” but “how can I make this piece more complex?”

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Jessica Gandolf, for example, has a chimeric practice in which imagery and abstraction seem to function not unlike the opposing sides of a chess game. She may paint a highly-illusionistic foot in one composition, then in her next work include a flat outline of a foot. Often she incorporates abstraction and representation within a single work. This tension between seemingly-conflicting modes of making leads her to innovation—just when a painting seems to be one thing, she flips the board around and plays from the other side.  She is playing multiple, simultaneous games, all with different rules.

Matt Demers, like Jessica Gandolf, moves fluidly between representation and abstraction in his practice. Two of the three works in this exhibition—“Can’t Complain” and “Wellness Check”—are portrait-like, while “In Spirit” coasts into being without any particular representational grounding. For Demers, solving the painting supersedes the images within them.

Demers doesn’t have the same push-and-pull with abstraction that Gandolf does. He’s more interested in pushing the work forward—making it slightly more complex, slightly more interesting—than trying to “finish" the painting. I would describe this approach as positional—in chess, this means you play the long-game, slowly building a strategic advantage. Demers’ approach consists of a slow, concentrated, accumulation of indirect movement, then, the painting appears quite suddenly, all at once, out of what moments before might have seemed to be disorder.

Competitive chess players study openings—the first few moves of a game, and the vast branches of gameplay that form out from them. Meg Hahn (known primarily for her small-scale, investigative, patchwork-color paintings) does something similar in her ordered monoprints; starting from the top-left corner and working her way through the composition, she returns again and again to the beginning, watching how a similar premise can unfold methodically from a single stroke. In this body of work, Hahn creates a narrow series of guidelines and then honors those guidelines. She works patiently within the game she has designed.

Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca—widely considered one of the greatest chess players of all time—was famous for doing as little as possible. Capablanca didn’t want to study opening theory; he wasn’t interested in what might happen in a game: he was concerned only with what was in front of him. 1 This economic, cutting approach to problem-solving is how I see Hannah Stoll’s painting practice: she is responsive, working one move at a time: she is willing to completely revision each piece after each move if necessary.

Stoll’s recent paintings are mazes—titled as such, and distinguished by letter, with “Maze J” being the most recent. In this series, she attaches small strips of wood onto her supports before working in oil, creating a three-dimensional puzzle to work on, around, and within, resulting in work with sharp visual logic. The brushworks in this series are fluid, emotional, and minimal—like all works in this show they possess a delicate balance of feeling and thinking, order and disorder, and spontaneity and structure.

Demers, Gandolf, Hahn, and Stoll are all practitioners of what we might call positional abstraction—they are slow, investigative painters working on many pieces at once, moving one step at a time, and aren’t committed to non-representational painting. While some painters begin with a decision of abstract or representational, these painters don’t seem very worried about it. They are simply trying to find a way through the painting.

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Jimmy Viera, Eleanor, Anderson, and Allison McKeen have different modes of working: moving in and out of modes and materials through play and by designing games.

Jimmy Viera, known for his sometimes-abstract, contour-based landscape drawings and paintings, who is represented in Infinite Games by a series of monochromatic drawings. Made over decade ago during the transitional period when he left printmaking and started painting, these drawings show us an artist designing his painting practice. There is a visible rulebook unfolding—each piece answers the question: how can I make a painting? Like Hahn, he makes himself a student of the game he designs. Many of the strategies used in his current work are visible even in this early work; using masking to create sharp lines, playful layering, a variety of textures, and a distinctive brand of geometric spatial play.

Eleanor Anderson’s smart works employ a wide range of craft-materials and techniques, and a rainbow of color. While many artists in this show play within a medium, one way to describe Anderson’s multi-disciplinary practice is the art of designing games and playing them. Anderson’s Ciphers operate as individual works, but also seem to be players within a larger game. Each one feels like a coded letterform: a signifier or series of moves on a flat field in a consistent orientation, as if they could be strung together and decoded. Her Prototype for Silver Lattice 2 is more reminiscent of a graph or rectilinear map. The small, handmade adornments reflect her interest in building a complex language. If the Ciphers are like letters, the Lattice like a novel: an entire world constructed of small, rambunctious moves.

Allison McKeen’s shares Anderson’s interest in color and fiber, as well as in material play. She describes her recent quilt paintings not as bridging a practice between painting and quilting, but between drawing and quilting. I believe what this implies about how she sees her works is that they are improvisational, spontaneous, and free—like drawing. There aren’t firm rules about what colors or materials or compositions are allowed, there is curiosity and an openness to the possibility of the next work. While most works in the series are abstract, she isn’t attached to abstraction—some quilts depict houses, pencils, even a few coffeepots, while others incorporate her own recycled printed fabric which contains vegetables, chairs, and other homey, comforting imagery. McKeen’s practice is one filled with joy.

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The artists in this show are people who like to linger with a good problem. Instead of finding the most direct route, they may opt to divert and digress, and they sometimes even change their own rules midway. They don’t work toward one goal, they work toward as many goals as they can identify.

I’d argue there is something to be learned from this approach to art-making right now. I think it’s worthwhile to stay with a puzzle a little longer, and to not feel the need stick with one material, or concept, or theme. These artists refuse to play a singular game, instead opting to pursue a plurality of visual interests and languages. This type of practice isn’t always celebrated, in fact, it can be a challenge to promote because it doesn’t neatly fit into a commercial box. Continuing to work in this manner—which these artists have done for years, and in some cases, decades—requires integrity. They pursue expansive, messy practices that refuse to be bounded in, but instead spiral out, infinitely.

Endnotes

1 Capablanca is often quoted as saying “I only see one move ahead, but it’s the correct one.”

2 Prototype for Silver Lattice is a preliminary work for Silver Lattice, a 22-foot tapestry which curator Haley Clouser described as the “magnum opus” of her recent solo exhibition “Color Block” at the Visual Arts Center in Richmond, VA. For more information, see: "Prerequisites of Play” by Haley Clouser, 2025.