Attention Painting that uses only a few colours, simple forms, repetitive structures, uncomplicated premises –painting such as Adrian Gollner’s work –is painting of reduced means. With a decrease in variety of visual information, the remaining essential elements of a painting speak louder and with greater importance. The work of Adrian Gollner is painting of intensified attention. His works are meditations on landscape, abstracted. They are also systematized painting constructions with a concern for process and sculptural integrity. The motivation for abstract painting is always real things and the painters’ felt experiences. While some painters hide, obscure, or keep secret their references, and for some painters their motivations are to themselves obscure, many will frankly admit what is the inspiration and sources for their use of colours and form. The act of painting is a complex dynamics of desire and pleasure. Abstract painting is concerned with visuality and the pleasures of seeing. By the exercise of imagination, seeing also can include virtual sensations of touch, taste, sound, and emotional feeling. Among the myriad of references a painter may use are qualities of light, feelings of personal relations, a sense of landscape, somatic sensibility, systematic formulations for the application of paint, etc. The painter may feel an urgent interest in the consequences of their actions within a certain narrowly defined field, and take that field of action to be the art of painting. So it is from a rich physical (literally sensational) and social matrix that painting emerges. Adrian Gollner’s recent Process Paintings and Constructions are works of abstract power and material interest. Speaking of the direction his paintings have taken in the past two years, Gollner says: When I had my original idea I was thinking landscape. I also had some abstract formulations in mind. Something about landscape Notions of landscape are specific and constant references in Gollner’s works, in the physical orientation of the rectangles, in his colour choices, and in his use of wood as a motif. The horizontal rectangle has become the primary painting form for Gollner’s work. This so-called ‘landscape-format’ rectangle emphasizes horizontality. When one rectangle is placed above another there is a landscape effect of the simplest kind with a ‘sky’ and a ‘ground’ or ‘sky’ and ‘water,’ depending on the colours. When four, or eight, of these rectangle units are combined the horizontal emphasis is increased. The vertical axis in the centre of a four-panel composition becomes the insertion point for the viewer. The vertical line reflects the vertical orientation of the person standing in front of the painting, the figure in the landscape if you will. The colours Gollner chooses are inspired by his experience in the land. The colours have a mood and a temperature. They refer to skies or the earth. Blues are water. Speaking of a particular painting Gollner remarked that the blues ‘turn into water,’ and ‘on the edges are not far from the swamp.’ In the painting Lichen Wall Construction, 1991, the colour is directly inspired by some lichen that Gollner saw growing on rocks north of Kingston last spring. In other paintings, a certain brown is inspired by the sight of matted brown leaves appearing on the ground after the snow has melted. In many of his recent works Gollner has included wood construction in compositions with his painted canvases. The wood pieces are both part of a picture of the land, and in the paintings they are explicit structure. The interior of the painting is exposed revealing what the painting is formed around, the painting stretcher. The In some of the earlier works these bars of wood were inspired by ‘mini-stretcher frames’ turned around. When these wood constructions are combined with the painted canvases a split is created, again like a landscape. Gollner is fond of the wood texture and grain pattern. The squaring of the lumber and the stacking of the pieces is an explicit ordering of the tree, a cultural patterning and ordering overlaid onto an element of the landscape. In his most recent works Gollner has introduced the representation of wood paneling into his constructions. This use of the image of faux wood in his work complicates the landscape tremendously. Wood paneling is typically false wood-grain already. Gollner is representing a fabrication of an idea of wood, so we are twice removed from ‘real’ thing. It is an amusing double depiction, both cultural and natural, of a rec-room picture of the woods. Abstract concerns Gollner is also interested in the material qualities, explicit structures, and processes of painting. Important processes include the building of painting supports and the application of paint by layering and scraping. The rectangles that Gollner construct are arrived at by intuitive feel, a sizing and scaling that results in the characteristic and emphatic horizontal orientation of his work. Paint is combined with wax and applied caringly in layers. The patterning of the paint in the rectangular panels reveals the motions which were used to apply the encaustic. The wax is thick, real, material, layered, and almost sculptural. Lovely greys are obtained by the layering of mixtures of wax and pigment. The formal character of the work is attractive for its qualities of paint application, colour, and scale. Gollner is conscious of the works’ sculptural integrity and is concerned with their flatness and their position on the wall. There is the persistent flickering in the reading of these works between seeing them as elegant, formal, sculptural constructions and viewing them as abstracted landscapes.