EriK Spehn Buckets of RAin

December 13th - January 25th, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, December 13th, 5-8pm

Erik Spehn is a painter. He paints. His work is painting; it’s results are paintings. Rooted in a structure of grids that he has used for decades, Spehn’s paintings radiate lines and blocks of color revealing the linen surface on which they are offered. These are what the critics of painting call “systems”, but those systems elude our normal descriptive abilities.
These paintings exist as what we commonly call “abstractions”, but what do they abstract? There is no reference to man nor beast, no landscape nor still-life to detect or even to surmise. One could call them “non-objective”, but but that belies their objectification in the process of creation.
If anything the works abstract something else which few of us understand, with which we are generally unfamiliar, and which thus escapes both superficial comment and casual inspection.
This visual body via each individual canvas clearly is the work of an assured artist with an able hand which translates through some intervention, divine perhaps, results which come directly from Spehn’s ongoing interest in philosophy. To be more specific in this artist’s case: ontology, phenomenology, Jungian individuation, and the Prajnaparamita corpus of Sanskrit literature.
If this seems too scholarly for the enjoyment of an art exhibition the viewer can take pleasure in the undeniable fact that the painting are just plain beautiful. They are a feast for our eyes just as much as the outpourings of an artist’s studious soul.