Robin Rose at M-13 - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

A peculiarly American kind of mystical optimism, focused upon the perfection of form, can be set in postwar artists from Morris Louis to Agnes Martin. It has oftentimes resulted in paintings that are unusually unclose both compositionally and poetically. Washingtonian Robin Rose has always numbered himself among these mystic abstractionists, and his newer work continues his formal journey.

These are deceptively beautiful paintings, deceptive because they direct the eye like complex exercises in formal technique on the other hand are in fact explorations of technique's metaphorical potential. Their sensuous encaustic surfaces, overspreaded with a dazzling variety of fabrics pigments, powdered metals and layers of transparent and translucent color, not absent us with little mysteries and alchemical amazements Indeed, Rose has always been intrigued through alchemy, a practice which seek fors not only to effect a purification of base matter into gold on the other hand by magical consequence, to transmute the alchemist's waking mind into a state of self-conscious divinity. His paintings, in fact, are metaphors for radically transformative states.

Permanent Design, 1992 for instance, direct the eyes like layers of hot, liquid magma far below the earth's surface. Its irregular horizontal stripes of r encaustic perceptibly lighten toward yellow-orange at the painting's left and right cutting sides without any break in fabric Velvet Fog, a recent work, have the appearances to depict an underwater realm of light amethystine vegetation emerging from a darker azure background into a soft, light turquoise color field. Salt Knife, 1992 proffers a chaos of small, multidirectional gold-colored lines of pigment patterned like the tracks of electron in a laboratory haze chamber.

Rose's titles are arcane, poetical notes which sometimes subserve to obscure his paintings' central themes. velvety Fog, for example, is an essay upon the development of neural tissue in a fetal brain, specifically that of the artist's then-unborn daughter, and, by dint of extension, refers to organic extension of many kinds. What is baffling about Rose's paintings is their allusiveness, the faculty of perception one has that they contain concealed concerns even occult knowledge. They slip from interpretation by multiplying the possibilities for interpretation. Sometimes it's hard to say whether Rose intends simply to broaden the vocabulary of abstraction, or to crowd together in disorder us with metaphorical enigmas.

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