HOLLINGSWORTH uses abstraction as his language in art-making because it is not grounded in any universal or grand generality. For HOLLINGSWORTH, abstraction is tied to individual experience and individual sensibility. It is the production of forms of order that are not recognizable as order, but vehicles of feeling. "Abstract art is far from speaking to those things that unite us, to what we all have in common," the artist states, "as it is generated precisely from giving the greatest vent to those things that make us individually different and separate from each other; and it is by this very process that it re-energizes our shared culture."

HOLLINGSWORTH creates playful and sophisticated paintings, which feature shapes from circles to spheres, targets to beach balls. All are aesthetic and expressive, and seem to float on his highly textured backgrounds. HOLLINGSWORTH'S paintings bear a resemblance to pop art of the 1960s and 1970s, though this similarity is largely skin deep. Below his circles and targets lies a rich, enlivened, translucent surface that owes more to minimalism than mass culture. "It is a way of saying I can be a formalist, but I am also tickled by the games of artists from Duchamp to Damian Hirst," he says.

Depending on the palette of each canvas, HOLLINGSWORTH'S circular motifs can be vaguely allusive or explode across the canvas in a rainbow of color. Weaving and overlapping circles spread outward, disappearing behind adjacent bursts, while allowing others to continue unimpeded. HOLLINGSWORTH'S decisions are more intuitive than systematic, and these decisions heighten the vibratory impact. His images burst well beyond the confines of their square supports, creating a physicality hard to sustain and hold. Rich background pigments cascade downward, separated by thinner gaps full of an encompassing, lyrical world of pure color.

"Abstract art is a symbolic game," he says. "You have to get into it, risk all, and this takes a certain act of faith. Not a faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith. But a faith in possibility, a faith not that we will finally know something, but a faith in not knowing, a faith in our being confounded and dumbfounded, a faith fertile with possible meaning and growth."

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