Zeljko McMullen at Meantime Co.

Zeljko McMullen
”WHAT I KNEW AS FIRE”
Meantime Co.
December 3 - February 27

The works on paper are in cheap frames and not even hung straight. The larger paintings are executed over thrift store finds. A pair of gaudy monitors present animations of the paintings to the sidewalk, and seen under the “Abogado” label on the window — the gallery shares a space with an attorney’s office — could be mistaken for screensavers left running by a careless paralegal after the office has closed for the day. 

The works are wonderful; it’s clear even through all the clutter. Perhaps in a proper installation they would be too wonderful to bear. They crackle and spill, like pop rocks. The layering of splatters over bleeding fields of color suggest that life can collapse and be born anew in the space of a picture. The eye is given both deep, sinking, fading away, and glimmering immediacy. These pictures fade into and burst out of the plane. There’s a Pollock reference begging to be made, a splatter painting is a splatter painting after all. But these are unmonumental and joyful in a way no Pollock ever was. In Pollock the paint falls onto the canvas, where he and we discover the limit of painting in that ultimate barrier. In these pictures it emerges otherworldly from the page.

Mid-century abstraction required that all other noise be silenced; these thrive in the din. You can find the artist in the gallery or smoking outside, projecting specters onto the pictures, making adjustments. Unmonumental applies not just to size here but to event: it’s not singular but ongoing and ever-developing. He doesn’t seem too enamored with the permanent and delineated dent in the spacetime continuum made by a singular work of art. Too bad he’s created dozens of them.