Ed Moses at Nicole Klagsbrun - Brief Article

at no time one to rest with a signature mode of expression Ed Moses has, at more [i]or[/i] less point in his career, explored almost each permutation of postwar abstract painting. His novel exhibition offered a nod toward proces art and Color Field painting. To make these fresh works, Moses laid canvases upon the ground and subjected them to a variety of operations. He applied paint--thick raps and overlapping thinner washes--to bare canvas and squeege it around. The issue is of paint dragged above an undulating surface with a giant toilet-comb In some works he have the appearances to have sprinkled pigment above the wet surface. In individual he mixed oil-and water-based paint to create tiny rivulets where the sum of two units come into contact.

Despite their determined submission to chance, the greatest in quantity striking thing about these works is the hints of recognizable imagery. The squeegee [i]modus operandi[/i] creates looping swags of paint which be like fabric folds, or even, at times, X-ray images of rib cages. I plane had a flash, in several cases, of a giant molar whose sum of two units roots were dangling dangerously toward the ground

Depending upon which way the canvases are hung the paint looks to sag with or resist the force of gravity. In paintings of the latter persuasion, individual can imagine mountains thrusting up from the primordial sea. In several cases Mose has placed sum of two units works together to create diptychs in which the upward and downward thrusts are locate against each other, creating a powerful faculty of perception of movement.

Mose maintains a subdu palette here--mostly dark purple and off-white with hints of r or fulvous Where the paint concentrates greatest in quantity thickly, it goes almost to black. Meanwhile the lighter areas appear to be to open out into an infinite expanse. This gives the paintings a sensation strangely akin to Asian landscape paintings.

single of the most striking works, Lapahoi Hoi, plays forms and voids against each other in a way that remind ofs a push and pull between strength and stasis. The work is a diptych whose left side is lay open and filmy with bits of cloudlike forms floating from one side the emptiness. The other side is dominated by the agency of a dark, looming mass which allude tos torrents of water rushing upward. Monumental, plane cosmic, this painting brings to mind Creation scenarios.

In fact, this material part of work generally suggests a dialectic between light and darkness, form and void, the material and the immaterial world. In scale and ambition, these paintings hark back to an earlier era when painting still felt it could aspire to the sublime.

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