The twisting, florid shapes that Jim Hodges has cut into panels of mirrored glass for his installation I dreamed a world and called it Love (2016) recall the blooming vines of Art Nouveau ornament, but the lines are too hard and angular to suggest a direct allusion. Moreover, Hodges’s patterns aren’t ornament—they are the whole work. A kernel of something tender and organic becomes monumental as its forms repeat and spread over the panels, which line all the gallery’s walls, through a riotous rainbow of colors, with a sustained pause in shimmering tones of black and gray. This new work continues an approach that Hodges has used consistently over the last thirty years: he takes a craftsman’s minor gesture and exaggerates it—in repetition, duration, and intensity—to create a work of overwhelming beauty. Here, his bright glass forms and patterns exude a mighty fragility. —Brian Droitcour
Pictured: View of Jim Hodges’s exhibition “I dreamed a world and called it Love,” 2016, at Gladstone, New York.