Image Courtesy of Brandon Anschultz
He originally studied architecture, and you can see the hand of the draftsman as well as the painter in Brandon Anschultz’s canvases; even his most extroverted images are razor-sharp clean. He often bisects his paintings with a thin fluorescent orange or acid yellow line (he calls them “energy lines”) which are rendered with such precision you’d swear he was packing protractors and French curves alongside his tubes of paint. On October 10, Anschultz presents his third solo St. Louis show, Transmission/Destination, at the Millstone Gallery at COCA. Curated by Shannon Fitzgerald, the show was inspired by a schematic diagram from Claude Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, though the painting that began the series, Dark No- Ship (above), emerged after Anschultz reread the Dune books. Though he’s quick to note it’s not figurative, Anschultz says the painting became a study for a series of drawings, which led to a small sculpture (a black cube, studded with nails and a glass cylinder) which led to more drawings, more sculptures, more paintings. The beauty of this show is in the way it telescopes, creating a sort of ecosystem of concepts, colors and shapes. Though the images may not look like any animal you know, you still get the sense that you’re receiving biographical information about the figure on the canvas. That’s quite a hat trick—one that, perhaps, only a guy who’s part scientist, part painter, part sci-fi mystic could pull off.
Related: Read a transcript of Anschultz and Fitzgerald discussing “Transmission/Destination,” which runs through November 23. Millstone Gallery, 524 Trinity, 314-725-6555, cocastl.org.
