SLOW MOTION
Art in America
June 1982
Long known for his complex abstractions based on a layered grid, West Coast painter Ed Moses has in recent years developed a looser, more gestural mode of address--one that eschews New York school angst in favor of a fluid equilibrium.
Ed Moses's new paintings are vulnerable to misinterpretation. The six works that he showed recently at Louver Gallery New York are gestural abstractions that reach toward heroic scale--the two single panels, three diptychs and a triptych are as much as 12 feet across--and he paints them on the ground, a la Pollock. But these works are not auratic powerhouses; the resemblance to Abstract Expressionism is superficial.
Moses has been painting for more than 30 years. He is best known for a long-running series of deeply spatial diagonal-grid paintings, in which wetly ruled lines pile up in layer upon methodical layer [A.i.A June '76]. The method produces vertiginous, hollow spaces only slightly tempered by occasional seepages and splatters that aspire to pull attention back from the depth and to the surface.
In his current mode, which he adopted in the late '80s, he still paints in layers, but straight lines are now entirely absent. Nevertheless, the paintings contain the memory of grids: they are distinguished by long, broad, wavery sweeps of paint that are often approximately vertical and horizontal, like battered or stretched tic-tac-toe structures. His judicious superimposition of irregular lines focus attention on peripheries; shape and movement are defined by thin, papery edges that bring to mind the torn-poster compostion of Villegle or the peeling-paint photographs of Siskind. Like those works, his paintings, somber and tattered as they are, offer a peculiarly contemporary beauty of complexity and imperfection.
Many of the paintings are dominated by a brownish tone, although oranges and reds introduce a subterranean fire, yellow sometimes illuminates the paintings from within, and there are fragmentary veils of green. The paintings, for all their visual accumulation, are devoid of New Yorkish compression and tension. Semitransparency plays a central role. The layers are as light as cloth, and the paintings have a fluidity and airiness--along with a certain dusty grubbiness--that seem keyed to Los Angeles. They are, one might say, both pacific and Pacific.
Moses does his painting outdoors, on a concrete slab at his Venice, California, home and studio, in a setting that is urban but low-rise and quiet. He uses, among other painting implements, long-handled mops. As a result, the gestures in these paintings--for example, the yellow "apparitions" (his word) on the left panel of the diptych Khotan--often exceed the sweep of a man's arm and lack the familiar track of a brush. This small step back from directness of execution offers a certain distance from ego as well. In these paintings color and line seem propelled by forces more universal than one artist's personality (an attribute they share with the more weighty and textured but likewise swabbed canvases of Edvins Strautmanis).
Moses seems to be moving to loosen conscious control--a goal perhaps inspired by the Buddhism that he follows. He works from all sides of the canvas and avoids giving the paintings an orientation until they' are almost finished. In addition, he uses materials that tend to combine unpredictably: he overlays oil, acrylic and shellac that may crackle, check or separate as they dry. Sometimes format aids openness, as in the multipanel paintings, which in his recent New York show were gathered in the main room of the gallery, multiplying the size, complexity and colors of the single-panel works one saw first, near the entry. A patch of color or an engaging line that in a single-panel painting might seem iconic is provisional here, because it can't have solo stage and is always seen in relation to colors and lines on the other panels.
These paintings are far more spatially ambiguous than those earlier diagonal grids, yet their implied depths are more accessible. The depth is comfortable, unspecified but not unlimited, kept shallow in part by bright advancing colors such as greenish yellow, transparent rose and almost-fluorescent orange. There's often a hint of figuration in vertical bands of paint that appear on vertical panels of roughly human height--notably the ghostly or amoebic figures at the left of the diptychs Gomul and Kkotan. Identifying with these presences, one can almost effortlessly project oneself into the illusionistic spaces Moses has woven.
Moses's paintings, shape, color and line are all in motion--butt it's a slow motion. In addition, all the paintings but one have a curling narrow line somewhere on them, applied with a sponge on a stick. In Turfan, the kimono-shape triptych, the small left panel has distinct lines reminiscent of Arabic script. In the context of these rather loose paintings, the marks might seem surprisingly intentional and virtuosic, but in the diptych Tum-too similar though more extended meandering lines bring to mind the bug trails one might see in sand or in tree bark.
Another repeated "figure" on all the big works is a "nodule"--a roughly circular shape with dark edges that 'seep outward here or there – which recalls photographs of the pockmarked landscape of the moon or one of those optical illusions that can look convex or concave depending on the placement of shadow. These nodules usually appear at the end of a large color swath, where pigment accumulates as Moses lets the mop rest.
Different pictorial elements occupy one's attention at different viewing distances. From afar, the great swabs have the most power, but at the middle distance it's such shapes as "script" or "nodule" that draw one's eye. Up close, topographic exotica take over--shiny patches, stippling, intense black marks that swim in watery space. Darkness and spotting make the canvases seem dirtied and worn, introducing notions of the passage of time. Yet on intimate examination the surfaces have the fascinating textural variations of ceramics: it is as though transparent, shiny glazes have shrunk and cracked to reveal something different underneath.
Moses never seems to work toward a single, unified effect. In his paintings we're not told where to look or what to see. He welcomes a range of possibilities. His is an abstraction without angst, and equally without quotation or mockery. Moses sets up a situation, lets things happen and looks for a spark which ignites his imagination; art for him is a matter of patient waiting and watching and thinking. The Japanese potter Shoji Hamada once said that making art should not be a struggle but should be like walking downhill in a gentle breeze. Moses's paintings, for all their layers and colors and even occasional busyness, suggest just that sort of calm.
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