John Duff’s casting is definitely post-Minimal, incorporating aspects of painting and sculpture into a single method, employing new materials, achieving a form which is both organic and geometric. Duff builds a form of plywood, paints the interior and then coats it with fiberglass. The paint and even a little of the plywood come off on the fiberglass, coloring and texturing the outside surface of the piece. The single color used this year is deep reddish brown. You sense that the outside of each piece was once mysteriously the inside of something else, and that its current inside is also not entirely elucidated by the outside, or that, regardless of how a piece looks from one point of view, it will turn out to be quite different from another. There is a continual tension between this simplicity and the investigation necessary to really understand it in terms of Duff’s characteristic muteness.

—Roberta Smith