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Art in America
December 1985
Ed Moses
by Frances Colpitt
Ed Moses first showed at the old Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Since that time, he has been a regular, vital contributor to the art of Southern California. Although Moses's work eludes strict stylistic classification, his paintings are abstract, immediate and direct--he tends to avoid arcane symbolizing and narcissistic psychologizing. After an energetic, but somewhat disjointed showing at last year's Newport Biennial (at the Newport Harbor Art Museum), Moses's recent work seemed particularly cohesive. The 15 paintings on view exhibited a consistent sense of spontaneity; and, in fact, they were painted outdoors, laid flat on the deck of Moses's new house, over a period of just two months.
The 11 large works on canvas were the most powerful. Moses's familiar diagonal grid forms the substructure in black, hot red and metallic gold acrylic and oil. Great swaths of turquoise, gold, yellow, orange, and pink are built up and mopped across the surface, the water- and oil-base paints at places repelling each other so that the colors coagulate and puddle. Here and there the grid is worked in, tightening the image and imposing some control on the many layers of stains, splashes and swipes which seem to argue that denser is better. Unexpected in Moses's abstract space, however, was a new figurative element: stenciled black spiders, a hand's breadth wide.
Moses's work has always been characterized by an elegant draftsmanship which records the process of its making, but never before has the influence of Pollock been so evident. In these paintings color is both gestural and structural: it furnishes the building blocks of the grid that ultimately restrains the gesture. The tension generated by potential conflict between these two functions accounts for the paintings' sense of vitality, some of them even seem to breathe and glow. Moses has learned to abandon himself in order to create paintings, which are self-expressive without being self-indulgent.
But the spiders drive people crazy. What are they doing there, and what do they mean? Responding to my own query when I first saw the spiders last year, Moses alluded to the mystery of a dark cave. Entangled in a geometric web, the spiders are indeed mysterious, but in my view their schematic quality renders them completely innocuous. The broader context of the work does not support a symbolic reading. Not conductive to interpretive speculation, Moses's work speaks more purely in the language of paint and gesture.
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