Wayne Edson Bryan at Gallery K - Washington, D.C - Brief Article

WASHINGTON, DC

In the 21st hundred computers are as common as cars. We've become accustomed to finding digitized imagery everywhere, from magazine advertising to cinematic special consequences to Web-site design. For painting, always a discursive medium, to address the visual language of the computer is a cultural inevitability.

It was also an inevitability, granting a personal esthetic one, that compell Wayne Edson Bryan to create an exhibition of paintings devot to the qualities of digitized visual data. Bryan, like many Washington-based artists, has center his work upon the intrinsic power of information. Earlier, he dealt with vernacular quotations, including decorative evocations of the homages of American gangsterism and Elvis Presley and kitsch phenomena like as biker heraldry. These of recent origin paintings are more intensively about information itself, its graphic beauties and its sometimes autonomous and unintended graces.

Uplink, an enamel upon wood painting, offers an abstract drama of information in dynamic proces The title leaves to the transfer of data from a "ground" station to a data-retrieval station above the Earth. upon the right side of the picture, a series of green-bordered vertical black rectangles containing four regularly descending r dots are merging with each other and onto a vertical case of green horizontal rectangles. Several "families" of data in other arrangements, including a assemblage of dotted rectangles of differing colors in the lower left quadrant and a more frenetic pattern of curv weavings in the right background, appear to be stand in front ofed almost militantly, by the encroaching, motile nearness of the black rectangles.

This kind of information is as generally indecipherable as the patterns upon computer chips. Such mysteries persist in all of the paintings shown from colorful images of brain scans to digitized flowcharts depicting unknown processe What come ups esthetically is something that early 20th-century abstraction instinctively sought: the evocation of the basic arrangement of things, the primal visual theatrics of fact The paintings don't yield abundant in the way of humanized meaningfulness. Bryan gives us, instead, a vision of in what manner beautifully bits of information sing, smooth if only to themselves.

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