Tim Jag has a thing about honesty. His current work–represented by eight brightly colored pieces at Melanee Cooper that juxtapose panels of mass-produced fabric or paper with his own abstract painted patterns–is the result of the reading he did when he started grad school at Montana State in 1990. As an undergrad, influenced by artists like Eric Fischl, he’d been doing what he calls “psychological paintings of people in rooms.” But after reading Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt he abandoned the attempt to create illusions. “They were just calling bullshit on anything that had art talk attached to an image,” Jag says. “Stella said, ‘What’s there is what’s there, and nothing more.’ It was a stance that made sense to me, so I quit all this symbolism and stuff and made work just about the paint.” He found that all but one teacher objected to the shift, asking him how he could flip so easily: “All I could say was that this was the kind of painting that made sense to me–in the others, there’s a lie.” By the end of grad school, influenced by Rauschenberg, he was buying sections of patterned carpeting and collaging them onto his canvases, painting panels next to them.
