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The Rake Magazine, March 2004
Air-Ride Equipped: New Paintings by Jim Zellinger

Not content merely to be an ambitious new downtown art gallery, One on One doubles as a bicycle shop, and once a little remodeling is done it’ll triple as a coffee bar. Its second-ever exhibit features a painter with a similar bent toward combining art and transportation, New-York-by-way-of-Iowa’s Jim Zellinger. His boldly colored acrylics are all variations on a simple theme: Semi-trailers, sans rigs, as the sole image in some anonymous Midwestern parking lot, which is rendered as a bright sea of background color. Without resorting to aggressive abstraction, Zellinger still manages to extract a recognizable and compelling emotion from these flat, wheeled boxes. They seem almost lonely, perhaps abandoned by their human drivers. But he’s has also carefully pointed each toward something beyond the frame, as if they’re eager to get out on the road, for escape or maybe just fun. Makes you wish C.W. McCall was around to start a convoy.