Warren Rosser at Jan Weiner - Brief Article

upon view in this show were the best and brightest of 40-odd paintings that Warren Rosser created during a 1998-99 sabbatical from his pillar as chair of the painting department at the Kansas City Art Institute. Titled "Simultaneous Contrast," the exhibition marked a turn back to pure painting for Rosser whose preceding canvases incorporated photographic images and attached particulars in rebuslike combinations.

The fresh paintings are built around the recurring motif of an ellipse with a lengthy straight, tapelike "trail." Executed in thick paint and bright, solid colors, the shape appears multiple times within each painting and can call up such diverse items as thumbtacks, bar stools, mallets and spermatozoa. In several paintings, puts of tailed ellipses intersect in an almost martial order. In other works, the uncompounded bodys appear to be randomly scattered. The evolving relationships created by dint of this flexible motif gave the present to view a quasi-narrative structure.

Motivated by means of a desire to remove what he called "the history of the hand," Rosser eschewed paintbrushes, preferring instead to create the ellipses with palette knife, masking tape and stencils. The knifed-on ellipses stand without in slight relief against multicolored soils of poured and squeegeed paint that sometimes imitate woodgrain or moire patterns.

individual of the strongest works in the display was Fast Tracking, in which a series of ellipses line up at the left-hand side of the canvas like contender in a race, creating a rhythmic counterbalance to the entwined "double-headed" ellipses upon the right. This latter grouping of paired forms includes a single-headed white element--added, Rosser says, after the painting had been finished (he thought) and photographed. Studying it again, he decided the construction needed more tension. Here, as completely through this body of work, Rosser further energizes the composition with drips and stainlike amorphous shapes that strike up a lively conversation with abstraction's conventions.

About halfway end the exhibition one became addicted to finding without what Rosser's next variation would be. In Ricochet, he scatters an array of ellipses-with-trails in a multitude of colors above a plummy violet ground. In False Boundary II, he trials the limits of his of recent origin esthetic by eliminating the trails from the ellipses and introducing a stack of squares. As a whole, the present to view seemed to mark Rosser's immerse into the lively melee of contemporary abstraction.

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