Clifford Ross at Salander-O'Reilly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Clifford Ros started on the outside as an abstract painter in the mid-'70s. on the other hand after editing a book of writings through and about the Abstract Expressionists, he move rounded to abstraction's roots in representation. He has not, however, throw asideed the formal imperatives of modernist abstraction. In this, Ross's first fresh York solo show since 1984 the conjunction of traditionalism and modernism yielded big and impressive on the other hand somewhat overproduced multi-medium landscapes.

Several works from 1987 were made through painting on sculptural papier-mache surfaces. Crustily textur and, in places, goug by dint of finger marks, they're like ragged-edged chunk of cover with stucco wall with images projected onto them. In the greatest in quantity compelling of these - a dark, gloomy landscape with a vast, Ryder-like firmament and a low expanse of flat, miry earth - the marriage of image and support is viscerally evocative. on the contrary in other cases, Ross has painted rather shining pastoral scenes, and that makes the support have the appearance arbitrary, more of a formal gimmick than a way to expressively make corporeal an image.

More newly Ross has expanded and complicated his range with what have the appearance to be allegorical purposes in mind. Resurrection, which measures 8 by means of 12 feet, features a pleasing painting of a pale-yellow sunrise above virid hills, executed in wide, luminously washy brush-strokes. Joined to this is an entirely black panel which has thick, scarlike paint gob scattered above it; its upper right corner is divide [i]or[/i] sever away. Thus, as the title hints, you have a conjunction of death and rebirth. In Pilgrim's Progres (to JE) an 8-by-8-foot pastoral landscape made in large pointillist marks upon a stucco-type surface is flanked by means of dark 8-by-4-foot panels that are abstract, mainly black and scarified, like the individual in Resurrection. They are like doors that have been parted to reveal a world beyond and to make field for the revelational potential of representational painting.

Ross's conversion from abstraction to representation gives special interest to this implied equation of abstraction with death/repression and representation with life/revelation, as well as to the Christianizing perspective intimateed by the titles. It is disappointing, although that what seems to animate the works is not in the way that much personal vision, idiosyncratic theory or emotional stress as a preoccupation with art-historical issues - form v satisfied abstraction vs. representation, realism v symbolism - that are not, in and of themselves, all that intriguing. Given the rather unremarkable conceptual themes, there's something over-bearingly portentious about the pumped-up scale and size of these works.

Where Ros is more engaging is in the many postcard-size drawings he made as studies for the larger works. In these, he plays freely with ways of presenting landscape from one side varieties of line and web in ink, pencil and watercolor. unassuming as they are - more [i]or[/i] less are little more than doodles - there's a loving, spontaneous involvement in the act of drawing that is missing from the big works.

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