Gerard Hemsworth, like Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Steve di Benedetto, and Michael Scott, wants to define painting’s progress as an elaborated investigation of the brute necessities of its materiality. Even though this desire has been described as one of the two great poles of the dialectic of Modernism (the other being an esthetics of transcendence to replenish the spiritual void created by the secularization of society), its spiritual import is roughly the same as that of any other job, but a job that never seems complete.

Theoretically, of course, it is possible to reach completion, since