Minimal Works – Spatial Visions

Connor – second placed contestant of Numéro Switzerland’s third photography contest – first encountered Minimalism in art college, drawn into its quiet allure through the works of Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Josef Albers, Yves Klein, and Lewis Baltz. Their restrained precision and simplicity felt like whispers of a language Connor had yet to discover – a world where less could mean more, and where absence could speak louder than presence. Yet, as Connor pursued his degree from 2014 to 2017, he states to have found myself lost, adrift in uncertainty, longing for a sense of direction in his own work.

In response, Connor surrendered himself to exploration. He let Minimalism guide him, not just as an aesthetic but as a philosophy – an embrace of clarity, of distillation, of stripping away the excess to reveal something essential. Photography became Connor’s vessel, and for five years, he sought beauty in the overlooked: the stillness of car parks, the quiet geometry of lido pools, the faded lines of tennis courts, the stark planes of walls – even the unexpected poetry of a golf course. These places, isolated from their wider world yet still bound to their function, became Connor’s subjects. A parking bay, a stretch of astroturf, the precise curve of a painted line – each held traces of moments passed, echoes of presence left behind.

At first, Connor saw them as images of separation, fragments detached from the stories they once belonged to. But over time, they revealed themselves as something deeper – meditations on time, on solitude, on the delicate balance between emptiness and meaning. Their sharp lines and immaculate surfaces evoked the compositions of Constructivist abstraction, yet there was something else beneath their sterility – an ache, a quiet longing. Without people, without nature, without sentiment, they became mirrors for the viewer’s own emotions, vessels waiting to be filled.

Connor closed this chapter in 2022, yet something within it still lingers – an unfinished thought, a door left ajar. That sense of incompleteness, of something unresolved, still hums beneath Connor’s practice, a reminder that some explorations never truly end.