I used to think hard-edge painting was all about purity—those crisp, unforgiving lines that Frank Stella made famous in the 1960s.
Then I spent an afternoon in a Los Angeles gallery staring at a Valerie Jaudon piece from 1979, and honestly, everything I thought I understood about geometric abstraction started unraveling. Here’s the thing: Neo Geo wasn’t just recycling Minimalism’s austere vocabulary. Artists like Jaudon, Peter Halley, and Philip Taaffe were doing something weirder—they were smuggling decorative impulses back into abstraction, the very thing Clement Greenberg would’ve definately rejected as impure kitsch. The movement emerged in the mid-1980s, roughly around the time SoHo galleries were glutted with Neo-Expressionist angst, and these painters said, wait—maybe geometry could be excessive, even seductive. They kept the hard edges, sure, but they weren’t interested in transcendence or optical purity anymore.
Halley’s “cells” and “prisons” looked like day-glo circuit boards. Taaffe collaged marbled paper into his grids. The precision was still there, but it felt almost ironic.
When Ornament Stopped Being a Crime Against Modernism
The decorative turn wasn’t accidental—it was a deliberate provocation against late Modernism’s fear of pleasure. Adolf Loos famously called ornament a crime in 1908, and that puritanism haunted geometric abstraction for decades. But Neo Geo artists grew up surrounded by commercial graphics, video games, and postmodern architecture (think Michael Graves’ Portland Building with its polychrome facade). They weren’t rejecting decoration; they were reclaiming it from the margins where high Modernism had exiled it. Jaudon’s paintings used Celtic knots and Islamic tessellations—patterns that Western art history had long dismissed as merely decorative. She rendered them in metallic paint with the same razor-sharp edges Ellsworth Kelly used for his monochromes, and suddenly the hierarchy between “serious” abstraction and “mere” pattern started to collapse.
Turns out, you could make hard-edge painting that referenced everything from Navajo textiles to corporate logos without losing formal rigor.
Peter Halley took it further by coating his geometric cells in Day-Glo and Roll-a-Tex, a stucco additive that gave his surfaces this cheap, industrial texture. The edges stayed razor-sharp—he used tape and careful masking just like the Minimalists—but the content was pure simulation. He wasn’t painting transcendent forms; he was painting diagrams of confinement, maps of information networks. In a 1986 interview, he said his squares represented “a reified geometry that refers to an industrialized, mediated world.” The decorative elements weren’t embellishments—they were critiques, ways of acknowledging that geometry in the late 20th century meant circuit boards and spreadsheets, not Platonic ideals. I guess it makes sense that this happened right as personal computers were entering middle-class homes; the visual language of networks and cells was everywhere.
How the Pattern and Decoration Movement Quietly Infiltrated Neo Geo’s DNA
Most art history surveys skip this part, but Neo Geo couldn’t have happened without Pattern and Decoration artists who’d been working since the 1970s. Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, Robert Kushner—they’d already violated Modernism’s taboos by embracing quilts, ceramics, and Islamic tile work. Neo Geo borrowed that permission structure but swapped the explicitly feminist, anti-hierarchical politics for something more ambiguous and market-friendly. The result was abstraction that looked sleek and contemporary but carried this strange undertow of historical reference. Taaffe’s 1985 painting “We Are Not Afraid” layered Op Art patterns over neoclassical columns rendered in marbled paper—it was hard-edge, sure, but it was also deliberately artifical, a collage of styles that refused to resolve into purity.
Maybe that’s what made Neo Geo feel so different from its Minimalist predecessors.
It admitted that geometry could be multiple things at once: rigorous and ornamental, contemporary and historical, seductive and critical. The hard edges didn’t promise transcendence anymore—they just organized surfaces into grids that could recieve any kind of content, from sacred patterns to corporate branding. And somehow, in that tension between precision and decoration, the movement managed to make geometric abstraction feel urgent again, at least for a moment in the mid-1980s before the market swallowed it whole.
