Some friends of mine have been having a hard time understanding the comments I made about Jeff Jahn’s review of Bryan Schellinger’s show at Quality Pictures in Portland, Oregon. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to retrace my steps and provide an overview of the discussion, such as it is.
Bryan Schellinger seems to be embarking on a similar pragmatic journey away from Barnett Newman’s Onement by complicating his stripe paintings with all sorts of associations, including a false sense of perspective space, allusions to textiles and possibly abstracted veils of drizzling rain? Yet, despite these complications they are essentially process driven formal experimentations. As a painter having it both ways; both purely painterly and complicated through intervening elements is the fence to ride these days.*
Jeff Jahn’s analysis of the work of Bryan Schellinger on the PORT blog struck me immediately as being applicable to the work of Tomma Abts, presented for the Turner Prize show last year.