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Erik Spehn at Schmidt Contemporary Art
Art in America, Jan, 2008 by Mel Watkin
St. Louis artist Erik Spehn's breakout exhibition, his third at this gallery, consisted of 12 deceptively simple-looking but intensely detailed paintings (all works 2007). In each one, thin, not-quite-perfect horizontal and vertical stripes mimic the warp and weft of weaving.
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The exhibition was highly engaging formally, and it was impossible to resist wondering how the paintings--ranging from 39 inches square to 75 inches on a side--are made. Spehn gained increasing control over his labor-intensive technique while developing his process experimentally over 32 progressively complex works on paper. He uses eyedroppers to apply thin stripes of diluted acrylic over an opaque or transparent base coat, usually holding the dropper at the top of the canvas and letting gravity do the work, sometimes tilting the canvas to direct each droplet in as straight a line as he can master. Using successively reconfigured layers of vertically or horizontally oriented masking tape, the artist allows subsequent applications of paint to obscure the colors below. After many layers of paint accumulate, bumps in the surface texture cause a slight offset in each droplet's trajectory, and the painting begins to vibrate optically. Some canvases vibrate too intensely for me, prompting a comparison to Op art. I prefer the less active paintings, which have a subdued optical flutter that allows me to concentrate on Spehn's careful color juxtapositions and delicate surfaces.
The show-stopping ONLY 12,000 MILES looks as if it were painted with a brush. The 72-inch vertical droplets that create the composition are broken into what look like half-inch-long brushstrokes of off-white, beige and pale coral. Each "brushstroke" seems to be interwoven with an alternating ground of dark terra-cotta or deep brown, causing your eyes to jump repeatedly between positive and negative space. As with all the paintings in this exhibition, occasionally unanticipated dark areas and jagged edges break the rhythmic surface pattern. These welcome interruptions add punctuation to Spehn's mesmerizing surfaces and draw attention to their complexity.
In his artist's statement, Spehn, a die-hard formalist, writes that his "goal is to establish a uniformity throughout the composition, which upon closer inspection reveals the individual and very human idiosyncrasies, anomalies and imperfections of the hand." Spehn's imperfections draw us into the work. Without them his paintings would be too mechanical, too perfect and significantly less intriguing.--Mel Watkin
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