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The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous If there is less for the eye to see, so it seems to follow that there’s more for the mind to read into Amy Sillman swings the pendulum in the opposite direction; her work is formalist to the extent that we see the thought process visually manifested rather than suggested or signified The proof is in the paint, as opposed to in the accompanying essay or press release With a practice that grinds to dust a binary of figuration versus abstraction, the purity of abstract painting is corrupted in her work, where forms are blocks of colour floating in gentle encounters or sometimes clamouring for the eye’s attention before spluttering out into a hand, a foot, or a plumbing spigot Her shapes and colours are gaily capricious; when they stumble and smear, they laugh it off and say ‘I meant to do that’   Sillman’s images together are like sentences that speak in the timbre of drawing but wear a light jacket of painting In fact, she has described her practice as being really more like writing[1] As in writing, where words cluster into packs of roaming meaning, a Sillman painting is emboldened among its own kind Her paintings are like the building momentum of jokes, always writing towards a punch line forever carried over into the next painting Alone, they can look lost, like a drawing cell from an animated film In recent paintings such as ‘Fast painting #1’ (2013) and ‘untitled’ (2013) the quickly laid colours sit on the canvas with a liveliness like that of a runner bouncing on the balls of their feet, as if they might pick up and zoom off at any moment   Along with David Hockney, Amy Sillman is one of the most visible artists incorporating the iPhone/iPad drawing apps as a regular part of their practice In ‘Draft of a Voice-Over for Split-Screen Video Loop’ (2012), made in collaboration with the poet Lisa Robertson, Sillman recites Robertson’s words over a six-minute film made