Nell Warren’s paintings at PDX Contemporary Art have been on my mind all weekend. “Quandaries” they are called. I’ve played with that notion, echoing the word in the “quaint” look the paintings have or the “boundary” Warren blurs between abstraction and representation. My doubt not about if I like them but why. In her artist’s statement, Warren says her work reflects a “delicate balance of serendipity and intent.” That captures perfectly the chance and causal links in my own reaction to the paintings.

I love things that stir the flat-line horizon of deep memory, thoughts triggering long lost impressions, crowding words and images in such a press you’re barely able to see them in the gloaming and wave before they’re gone.

I say they are landscapes but I know that word doesn’t do them justice. On the one hand, they remind me of J.R.R. Tolkien’s illustrated maps of Middle-earth. They have a lazy, rolling, bucolic feel; a cartoonish quality even, at first glance. I thought of Smurfs! On the other hand, I might claim they’re abstracts, except how then explain what can only be a meandering river, pulling the eye switchback-like across the painting. No matter; as ambiguous and as contrived as they seem when you study them closely, they pull you in.

“Dreamy whimsy,” as Barry Johnson says. And on our joint Scatterday – that is, Friday – afternoon stroll through the Pearl, we kept moving round inside the PDX gallery, quickly, painting to painting, scrutinizing the detail in each, and absorbed by the total effect.

But I’ve found something menacing lurking in them, too. There are no living creatures, no structures. Lumps that may be forms struggling to emerge from the ooze. Or rounded, grassed-over hillocks like those chemical weapons burial mounds out east along I-84 near Umatilla. OK, they’re ambiguous. Landscapes coming to life or sinking into oblivion. Rolling, lumpish, as I said, and, the only thing vertical, an occasional swirling – gently swirling, mind – tornado-like column filled with, I imagine, Warren’s own unresolved notions – one might almost think temptations – about how these landscapes will transform.

I’m reminded of Geoff Dyer visiting the ancient Roman ruins of Leptis Magna, on the Mediterranean Sea in Libya, described in one of the essays in Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. It is the vertical that makes ruins – “scattered columns, arches, statues.” A column shows the “absolute separation between the timeless man-made and the eternal.” The “simplest lesson of antiquity” is that anything vertical “commands admiration.” But ultimately “the lure of the horizontal will always prove irresistible,” so that from “the point of view of sea and sky” the human history of a place ends when the horizon is “undisturbed by any vestige of the vertical: the final triumph of space over time.”

For Tolkien, the landscapes of Lord of the Rings were grounded in World War I, the total devastation of battlefields such as the Somme. And so that I can get some rest from Warren’s images, I’ve settled on a term Tolkien coined – “eucatastrophe” – to describe the sense of consolation and recovery he discovered in the happy-endings of fairy tales – a “sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.”

He gives you a momentary lift . . . and then drops you with the recognition that it may not repeat.

Unless you take in Warren’s show again, which I’ll have to do to check my recollection on another thought. In memory the colors of the “Quandaries” paintings are pale, with a pale green dominant – a green that takes me to the “U” chapter of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hotel, which describes a green of sea and motionless pastures. It is a “blank green,” a “bitter sea, dreaming of the bitter sea.” And yet green, Sorrentino concludes, “is the color used in municipal buildings, police stations, and insane asylums. It rests, it calms. It brings peace.”

Thank you, Nell Warren, for filling a weekend with green thoughts, so thick now it’s all I can do to round the phrase and turn off the computer. Watch that green WiFi light go black.