The painting and drawing practices of Alexander Ross, always in fundamental opposition, have increasingly been cross-pollinating. The paintings create photorealist illusions, and are thus, to a high degree, preordained. They are mappings of a kind, in which, in Caroll Dunham’s appreciative phrase, Ross “systematizes rendering as a conflation of sonar and paint-by-numbers.” The images they map are purpose-made glossy digital photo-collages of Plasticine sculptures, built in turn upon ideas in the drawings. As for the drawings themselves, they are pure inventions. They grow before our eyes. And if the synthetic atmosphere of the paintings can seem anaerobic (yet so viscously seductive that one willingly forswears oxygen), the drawings are earthy and florid, drawn as if by an ecstatic 19th-century Dr. Seuss looking through a microscope and reporting back from the microbial frontier. Simultaneous gallery shows in 2008 at David Nolan and Marianne Boesky showcased Ross’s drawings in relation to his then better-known paintings, emphatically revealing their opposition, but also their mediated interdependence as stages along a continuum. Think of Ross’s linkage of methods — drawing, painting, photography, digital manipulation, sculpture, and collage — as a fan belt designed to keep his mad-scientist ideas from overheating, to the point, as has often been noted, of post-human chilliness. But a thaw was evident as far back as those twin exhibitions of 2008. Hybrid drawing-photo works, graphically outlined paintings, and color-banded pencil illusions showed that Ross was in fact beginning to put drawing and painting procedures into direct contact, step by Gregor Mendel-like step.

The new work on view at David Nolan, a decade into these controlled experiments, exhibits full chromosomal exchange: the drawings are now essentially photorealistic, while the paintings invite graphic ideas into isolated Plasticene nodules and their increasingly open-ended backgrounds. Even more, the untitled paintings denoted (AR5072), (AR5073) and (AR5075) let drawing in from the beginning, where it lays down the law. Opting out of Ross’s previously inviolable figure/ground, sky/horizon convention, these unprecedented canvases offer soft frontal grids that can be carved into. This relief space is a revival of an established drawing motif, a vertical slice through cellular gray matter that exposes visceral pockets and interrupted ducts — rendered with Ross’s familiar low-bandwidth slime-o-realism. Yet, despite the sense of hidden rot or infestation thereby exposed, the tissue wall is soft and rounded, not a wound but a specimen cultured against laboratory glass, its graphic undulations blending smoothly, almost spongily, into photorealist punctures and cavities.

Normally at such border zones Ross lays it on thick, as in another hybrid canvas, (AR5232), which places a red trompe l’oeil fungal stalk abruptly against a backdrop version of the cell-wall motif, this one scrawled by oil stick into wet ground. In the context of Ross’s slow-boat methodology this loose sgrafitto is wildly Mattissean. But even so, it’s just another map-able asset, like the piled-up ridges of his fully photoreal passages. There, his meticulous sculpting of illusion owes equal amounts to the shifty self-consciousness of Gerhard Richter and the atelier positivism of Chuck Close. Or, going wide angle, we might take bearings on the viscid leafage of Thomas Cole and the encaustic hatchings on the maps and flags of Jasper Johns — the granddaddy and the grand Dada of American landscape. In that suspiciously empty wilderness, Ross may be our best contemporary guide.

The untitled paintings denoted (AR5233), (AR5234), and (AR5235) are far more typical of Ross’s exhaustive survey of a brave new world. They adhere to his longstanding if ceaselessly tweaked convention, mentioned above, of placing foreground figures against distant looming skies. Within this controlled environment he has been cataloguing “plastic life forms,” as he calls them, for some 20 years, as well as their degree of digital chunkiness, edge conditions, focal quality, and color spread. The startling twist in these new landscapes is that… well, actually, they aren’t landscapes at all, but faces. Or at any rate, Archimboldo-esque coagulations that insist on being read as faces. A couple of them sport genuinely fleshy tongues, though whether the tongues are human or amphibian or functionally attached is up for grabs. A half-dozen drawings on view also look back at the viewer, either as masks or dimly sentient beings, or maybe phantasms of a troubled mind. Some sport tongues that, as with those in the paintings, seem to have been ripped wriggling and wet from a higher life form. These new drawings closely follow Ross’s photorealistic painting procedures, though more atmospherically, by means of delicate, interfering layers of crayon color. At this moment the fan belt seems to be turning in reverse, as the paintings are driving the drawings.

As for the in-your-face faces: pareidoliac forms have always hovered a small step from cognition in the work, but here Ross takes a giant leap into the grotesque. No longer the objective bio-lab technician, the artist stands revealed as Victor Frankenstein. But will the stitched-together features in the new work come to life? Do they imply an embryonic — maybe even hostile ­­— intelligence?

From the evidence of the strangely goofy visages, there is little to worry about thus far. The Pugsley-and-Wednesday tongues notwithstanding, a preschool Jeff Koons might have Play-Dohed the blobbier ones among them. On the other hand, the most refined of the drawings, (AR5238), is creepily humanoid, its Plasticine skull sharpened to a Neolithic spear point. Protuberant horns and blades can be found in the face-conjuring paintings too, but here the heroic landscape scale evokes distant mountaintops as much as lethal body armor. (At 90 inches tall, one canvas is, I believe, Ross’s largest ever.) Still, the sense of scale is unsettled, and unsettling: the sharp peaks are preternaturally clear, and the over-exposed highlights glare forensically.

The more you look, the more pathogenic the paintings begin to feel, as if they might be dumb, deadly parasites whose incipient facial mimicry is evolving to penetrate the defenses of host organisms. If these repulsively seductive paintings feel unhealthy to view, that is no small accomplishment, and lesser artists would stop there. Ross, on the other hand, has just opened a Pandora’s Box of drawing ideas — new spaces, new structures — that the paintings now must pay attention to. Expect further mutations.

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“One word says everything about the people from whom I come and to whom I remain faithful because I find in myself all their defects: minor.  It is not an “inferior” people, it is a people for whom everything turns out small scale, in miniature (not to say caricature), even misfortune.” E.M.Cioran

As if a riposte to Cioran’s talk of “smallness,” the Romania of Serban Savu’s childhood, and the present-day Romania he describes, was and is the victim of colossal hubris.  He was eleven years old when, in the revolution of 1989—less than velvet compared with other East European countries—Nicolae Ceau?escu was deposed and executed, ending his quarter century dictatorship and four decades of communist rule.  The sufferings to which Ceau?escu subjected his country were anything but diminutive. An obsession with driving down national debt and a determination to destroy peasant culture led to years of economic stultification, the physical eradication of half the country’s 13,000 villages, the demolition of swathes of historic city fabric and the permanent scarring of the land with mindless and humungous structures, whether the utterly absurd House of the People, in Bucharest (at three times the size of Versailles, it was, in the words of Tony Judt, “a monstrous lapidary metaphor for unconstrained tyranny”) or conglomerations of mass housing, the “agro-towns” to which dispossessed peasants were sent, incongruously placed in the middle of nowhere.

In response to false grandeur, Savu often paints buildings and industrial structures that are imposing and drab. The eponymous edifice in The Gray 10-floor Block (2008) leaves no room for the sky above it, nor do the abutting blocks in the corner of Unveiling the New Furniture (2010). Savu’s attitude towards communism’s ubiquitous housing projects is ambivalent.  His paintings often acknowledge the stoic dignity of its drab modernism.  His brush finds hidden beauty in decaying concrete comparable to that discovered by the 18th-century Welsh painter Thomas Jones in the back streets of Naples.  The arrangement of browns and grays in the cropped segment of façade in Parking Sunday (2008) has a quiet poetry akin to a still life by Giorgio Morandi.  But beyond aestheticism, his accommodations of brutalist buildings into soft, lyrical landscapes, such as Ludus (2009) for instance, seems to carry a spiritual argument with its non-judgmental juxtaposition of an old village and an agro-town. This sweet and sour image is rich in possible meanings, but at various levels, it is cathartic, a consoling message to his countrymen.  It seems to say that nature can heal wounds, that the disruptive and also potently symbolic dichotomy of these two settlements on different sides of the river and all they represent about futures and pasts can nonetheless blend in some kind of post-historical picturesque.

There are two striking, seemingly contradictory features in the half-decade span of Savu’s short career: an unmistakable Savu look, and significant diversity.  Mood and purpose are consistent, but touch varies almost from canvas to canvas, determined by pictorial content and scale of each image rather than some stylistic progression. He works from photographs, some found in the media and others taken himself, which he assembles into working sources in Photoshop.  His locales are all actual places he knows and studies.  In some paintings there is a tough tightness to the realism, whether of the figures or buildings; in others there is painterly relish, as if within the last five years there are distinctions of touch as marked in Savu as in the extended career of the German 19th-century realist Adolph Menzel, who veered from early impressionism to a finessed classicism.  Savu’s smaller canvases, which often focus on a single figure and a singular observation, are often his most winning.

The more ambitious works, the multi-figure group compositions, are more forcibly touched with an element of incongruity yet they too hold back from full-blown absurdity, or even Surrealism. The Ceau?escu regime was so “surreal” in some of its manifestations – the surveillance techniques of the Securitate, the publishing of Ileana Ceau?escu’s pseudo-science, the cult of leadership that dubbed Ceau?escu “the Genius of the Carpathians, the Danube of Thought” – that Surrealism presents itself as an option to writers like Nobel laureate Herta Müller who, in one of her novels, has an apple tree that grows a mouth with which to devour its own fruit. Even at his most outlandish, Savu is closer to the incipient oddity of Giorgio de Chirico, say, than the overt weirdness of Salvador Dalí or the punning illogic of René Magritte.  Indeed, it is the degree of credibility in the scenes he depicts, and the slow unfolding of futility or misguidedness, that lends his scenes their charge.  He comes close to a symbolic uncanny (akin to the moral of folly in the inverse building construction of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel [1569]) in his painting The Old Roof (2009) in which four boys play soccer on the roof of a building whose center is dominated by a perilous two-storey courtyard.  There is still the possibility of a rational, prosaic explanation as to what is going on, however, that the boys are engaged in a dare-devil game in which the chasm of a courtyard adds gladiatorial risk to proceedings.

While Surrealism is a valid option for Müller in stories directly confronting the horrors of the Ceau?escu regime and the consequences of offering it resistance, to Savu and his close-knit circle of peers who were at art school together in Cluj, and whose study and launch of career take place post-1989, something more subtle and diffident is called for to describe the numbed state of reconstruction, of discovering normality amidst the ruins of a failed regime, and of coming to terms with the past as children of its last years, and of parents who had simply to keep their heads down and survive.  They are a generation that seems skeptical of big gestures and grand narratives.  It is telling that many of them have exhibited with the Cluj gallery Plan B whose very name betokens a bemused sense of what to do next.  Savu’s close associate, Ciprian Mure?an, works in a variety of conceptual and traditional modes but consistently in ways that send up the hubris of systems and situations with a gentle, comic understatement: exquisite pastiches of socialist realist drawings of (glue sniffing) young pioneers blowing into plastic bags; young school children reading Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros; a wall text, using vinyl cut from old LPs, that says, in English, “Communism Never Happened.” Mure?an’s gentle provocations seem intended to place him out of the market of big gestures.  There is, likewise, a wry and diminutive sensibility at play in Cristi Pog?cean’s sculpture, Modernist Bird House 2005-07, where the rationalist, functionalist architectural style adopted by the Party in mass housing units takes on markedly different attributes in this dainty, effete folly.

Savu’s delicious painterly touch is too assured to equate with the dazed and confused state of mind of the characters and situations he depicts, and yet there are elements in his style – his quietude, understatement, eclecticism, lack of flashiness – that relate to the shellshock mood of the post-1989 generation.

Though he attended the prestigious art school in Cluj, Savu is largely self-taught in his realism.  There is a common misconception about contemporary Eastern European artists that somehow, like Russian or Chinese artists, they must automatically be steeped in the language and techniques of academic socialist realism as if these are residual skills still enforced in art schools. Savu’s professor at Cluj in the 1990s was the neo-romantic painter Ioan Sbarciu, a colleague of the German neo-expressionist Markus Lüpertz and now a senator in Romania’s parliament, who would certainly have had no reason to enforce redundant styles.  Savu’s older colleague, Victor Man, took himself to Jerusalem to study at the small, independent atelier of expatriate American painter Israel Hershberg, the Jerusalem Studio School, to learn the old master techniques he craved.  Savu found his technique from close study of renaissance painting during an extended residency in Venice in 2002-04 (as recipient of the Nicolae Lorga postgraduate research grant) and this perhaps accounts for the relative primitivism in his handling of form, which is anti-academic.  In Cluj, while still a student, Man had sought out the underground painter Cornel Brudascu, an artist who had been persecuted by the regime for his sexual orientation and painted in eclectic styles.  Excelling as a flower painter, Brudascu became a personal hero to Man, Savu and a third young painter, Adrian Ghenie simply for his determination to do his own thing.  Savu’s painterly language, therefore, should not be read as an ironic riff on socialist realism in the way that makes conceptual sense in relation to the German Neo Rauch, who studied at Leipzig in the 1980s and makes skillful use of appropriated, anachronistic painting modes.

This argument does not preclude symbolic significance in elements of Savu’s style.  There is almost a willful dullness in his invariably subdued palette and a certain chalkiness in the texture of his paint that matches his pervasive melancholy.  That concrete is so prevalent a motif lends an odd associative feeling that somehow dust has rubbed off the buildings into the very pigment.  His dry, slow, carefully modulated paint application contrasts with the oily  flourishes favored by Man (in earlier works) and Ghenie.  Savu’s literal lack of slickness accords with the temper of his paintings.

Introducing art theory to the distinction between scale and size, Alberti exhorts the reader of his treatise on painting with the words: “Istoria gives greater renown to the intellect than any colossus.” Savu’s paintings are a profound record of a society in recovery from colossal errors of governance.  Recently, he has embarked on what are for him large paintings, but most typically, he is happy with a modest scale, and as has been suggested, a modest touch, pace and emotional distance.  He works in an idiom that is in two distinct senses “out” of history: it is historically derived (though without constituting a quotation or pastiche a particular moment) and it is out of step with current expectations. In much the way that American artists Elizabeth Peyton, Paul R. or Duncan Hannah adopt an illustrative, knowingly slight language that matches their penchant for nostalgia and infatuation, and within whose limiting confines there is nonetheless space for expressive growth, so Savu adopts a plainspoken style that risks blandness for the sake of empathy with his subject, and as an antidote to the bombastic imposition of grand schemes. This suggests, in contrast with his meteoric career successes as an artist collected avidly around the world, a kind of elective minority, a willingness to occupy a small corner of painting. Savu has found a niche where he can observe a future for his countrymen and work one out for his art.

Extracted by kind permission of Hatje Cantz.  Serban Savu: Paintings 2005-2010 is available from David Nolan Gallery and good booksellers

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May 5 – June 26, 2010
527 West 29th Street
New York City, 212-925-6190

Jim Nutt is part of the Chicago Imagists group which emerged in the 1960s as a regional version of Pop Art.  His fellows included Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Roger Brown, Suellen Rocca, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, Art Green, and Nutt’s wife Gladys Nilsson, almost all of them students of Ray Yoshida’s at the School of the Art Institute. Unlike the New York Pop movement, the Chicago variety took pop culture as a starting point and then diverged in two important ways. First, its focus was on a much darker, more sexually charged imagery such as that found in burlesque photographs, wrestling posters, underground comics, and pinball machines. Second, where the New York variety presented a cool, decidedly non-expressionist style of rendering, Nutt and the other Chicagoans reveled in a controlled but highly personal approach to drawing. Nutt’s earliest work in this mini-retrospective, Miss Sue Port, 1967, in acrylic on Plexiglas, presents an iconic example of this.  Part freak show poster, part Pinball machine glass, it features an electric yellow androgynous personage with one extremely large, pointed breast, bulging cod-piece, truncated arms, a horror show face, and a massive, corseted posterior. A potent cocktail of revulsion and attraction, this is precisely the kind of work that brought the Chicago Imagists to critical attention.

Over time, Nutt diverged from his Pop culture beginnings and the work began a gradual shift to a quieter internal narrative. The hyper-inventive figuration stayed, but Nutt slowly shed overt cultural references. By the early seventies, as represented in this show by the colored pencil drawing There Are Reasons, 1974, , the artist was playing with images of stage sets featuring wildly cavorting and contorted figures enacting sexually overt pantomimes. What followed was a consistent reduction in the amount of secondary information, coupled with an increasing focus on the figure. By the late eighties Nutt had narrowed everything down to isolated, singular, portraits.

The current series of refined women’s heads as presented in the main gallery is experienced as a packed and careful condensation of Nutt’s vision. For while the early works like Miss Sue Port feature tight compositions with dozens of objects and figures (the term horror vacui comes to mind), from a strictly mark-making perspective they are painted with the broadest of strokes. By contrast, in the later paintings the brush strokes are barely the size of an eyelash. Needless to say, making a painting with a brush this tiny requires literally thousands of marks. The result is a little less stuff, but a great deal more information being filled into each picture. This is no doubt part of the reason why Nutt produces but a few paintings a year. Indeed, of the seven drawings and three paintings representing the current work, only five of the drawings are from this year, and only one of the paintings, Trim.

It is not the process of making the paintings that stands out, but their hard won commitment to seeing. Standing in the main gallery, a quiet yet powerful meditative vibration seems to emanate directly from the works. Nothing is facile in these recent paintings and drawings; every mark is precise, meaningful and clear. This is easiest to discern in the drawings, where brief strong lines delineate a myriad of features and textures against the emptiness of the paper. The paintings have the same intensity of line, and add subtle modulations of color and tone.  In whichever medium, when a female head is depicted, the individuality of the features are intensified, not obfuscated, by the careful abstraction of each nose, eye, ear, and mouth. As in Cubism, the features differentiate within a single picture because they compress many moments into a single image. But there is more to the time compression than that. Nutt’s silent women simultaneously look at us and through us.  Ignoring our pressing gaze, they look unrelentingly inward.

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The shape-shifting biomorph continues its 100-plus year march at David Nolan Gallery.  Tracking the various frequencies on the pliant bandwidth of Biomorphism, Morphological Mutiny brings together paintings, drawings and prints by Steve DiBenedetto, Alexander Ross, and James Siena.  Incorporating abstraction and figuration, these three artists deliver an absorbing mix of the transformative, illustrational and apocalyptic strains in current painting.

Siena spins out maximalist effects from discreet minimal units.  His deceptively understated work yields a wealth of form and content, ranging from geometric abstract progressions and softly liquefied, optical grid flows, to cosmic-comic characters and sexualized tricksters.  In the middle zone, drawings titled Liminal Spaceand Liminal Pathway probe the ambiguous and interconnected play between unfolding space and figurative embrace. In Liminal Space, Siena dissipates form and charts the expansion of space that accompanies increasing formlessness.  Conversely, Liminal Pathway manifests embodied form that inhabits space.   Remixing high and low with a scratchy line and a fuzzy scrawl, Siena rehatches Biomorphism.  And in Angry Forms, a study sheet of five agitated shapes, he aptly insinuates a connection to Thought Forms, a 1901 treatise by Annie Beasant and Charles Leadbeater about the correspondence of emotion to shape and color.

Siena’s Earthless , with its smooth, enamel-painted aluminum surface, requires only a few seconds of attention before it works its magic and takes your breath away.   The labyrinthine spaces suddenly coalesce and rise and fall, optically vibrating as if an animated topographical map were pooling and waving its peaks and hollows.  For those interested in the psychedelic effects of retinal painting rooted in archetype, Siena offers an amazingly effective delivery system.

Across the gallery hangs Ross’s Untitled 2008-9 painting of a glam, klieg lit, sci-fi biomorph ready for its close up.   Glistening and chiseled, the figure is a world away from Siena’s expansive tail-biting interiority.  Instead, we face a caffeinated realm of enhanced, bright but relatively normative space.

Utilizing a computer collage aesthetic, Ross manipulates photo images of his plasticine sculptures and paints the results with sumptuous color and graphic finesse.  His seductive and precisely organized gradations of volume announce an ultra-mediated process.  Inspired by the microbial, Ross restyles the surrealistic figure via YvesTanguy and Gumby, shelving any vestige of automatism.  What remains is an emphatically descriptive, photo-realized affair with mutations from the lens.

In Untitled 2008-9 Ross’s highly articulated figure is set against an abstract ground; the ensuing construction of pictorial space is simple and graphic.  The preening alien seems grafted onto the decorative backdrop, an effect oddly reminiscent of Cecil Beaton’s 1951 Vogue shots of a model in front of a Pollack painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery.  In Untitled 2009 however, the ground is a dynamic field that creates a compelling tension with the figure, as both share a structural DNA that intimates the possibility of infiltration through a porous border.  It will be interesting to see if Ross will allow the figure to burst its container and break on through to the other side.

Unstable and apocalyptic, Steve DiBenedetto’s mesmerizing drawings and energetic paintings are intriguingly complex.  In DiBenedetto’s Untitled and Quantascape drawings of 2009, colored pencil and graphite seem to scatter and coalesce in rhythmic pulsations across the sheet.  Using a protean array of line and color, in which figures slip into fields, architecture and constellations, DiBenedetto distinguishes himself as one of the best drawing practitioners around.  In Untitled 2009, shape-shifting grotesques meander across the oscillating fields, and freely associate like Rorschach blots in a psychedelic blur of color.  In Quantascape the punchy and economical use of white ground nearly upends the colorful swirl of effects.

There is a method to DiBenedetto’s sympathetic and synaptically connected free flow of imagery; the continuity between the paintings is undeniable. In Untitled 2008 DiBenedetto uses a relatively modest paint application against which he incises a web-like scaffolding by drawing paint away from the surface.  White and amber paint is then reapplied to openings within and around the structure creating a golden glow. He conveys an experiential ethos reminiscent of late Surrealist paintings of the 1930’s and 40’s by the likes of Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Jerome Kamrowski.

Dibenedetto along with his comrades Siena and Ross have defined an architectural endoskeleton within the body of the biomorph, a decidedly third millennium proposition.

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Serban Savu paints the Romanian landscape, a topography where man lounges in nature amid the remaining manifestations of the Communist era. In depicting what is stereotypically perceived in terms of a diametric relationship between man and nature, Savu’s portrayal of these forces takes its cue from Romanticism. The distinctions are less clear: nature is not natural—flora, fauna, terrain—but rather evokes man’s presence, in such forms as industrial structures, heaps of industrial materials and the visible atmospheric results of industrial processes. If Romanticism involves a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities, then Savu’s 21st century rendition reinvestigates this concern, imbuing these vistas with a subtle and wry nostalgia for a more economically prosperous time when Communism brought more stable employment.

The painting In the Shadow of the Dam (all paintings 2008 and oil on canvas) is redolent of the bathers in paintings by Edouard Manet and Georges Seurat, which were made at a different moment in the industrial revolution’s trajectory. In particular, Seurat’s 1884 Bathers at Asnieres comes to mind. The horizon line in this painting contains billowing factory smoke stacks and what appears to be a steam engine train crossing a trestle. In Savu’s painting, the horizon is almost completely eclipsed, as the title implies, by the hulking concrete structure of a dam, assumedly made during the Communist era. Even more salient are the bathers in Savu’s They Cannot Hear Us, two figures whose upper bodies emerge from and punctuate a river in a haze that extends towards distant factory smokestacks. These figures are all but takeoffs of Seurat’s figures, murky cut-outs awash in what appears to be polluted environs.

Although the architecture’s physical decay reflects its economic uselessness, such romantic titles as The Guardian of the Valley and Mountain of Nostalgia lend emotional value to these dour and severe scenes. These paintings speak to the failed utopian ideas in Communism.  In The Guardian of the Valley, a nondescript figure leans against the railing of what appears to be an elevated concrete structure with small sheds atop of it.

The figures in Savu’s scenes are similarly painted in an anonymous fashion: In The Edge of Empire, facial features are suppressed, blurred in suggestion of an overcast recollection or impression. In several paintings, but most strikingly in Peripheral View, this hazily, blurred quality is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s landscape series. The figure’s isolation also recalls the young contemporary German painter Tim Eitel’s lonely figures in empty spaces but also the romantic trope of the individual at the center of life and art, crafting an expression of unique feelings and particular circumstances.

Although this work appears to have a social realist ethos, Savu’s paintings remind me of Italo Calvino’s magical realism. In particular, the collection of short stories “Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City” comes to mind. In this cycle of stories the eponymous narrator, a romantic and a blue-collar worker, longs for nature in a northern Italian city in the 1960s during the illusions of an economic boom. In these stories, while what on the surface may appear conventionally realistic is in fact paranormal or preternatural. Nature overshadows urban life, rewarding Marcovaldo in surprising and unexpected acts of beauty. In Serban Savu’s painting, I sense a similar longing for nature, a desire to escape from the unpleasant reality of the present through these wistful images of the architectural relics in the landscape of Romania’s past.

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Dore Ashton, Joshua Mack and Stephen Maine joined David Cohen to review Julian Hatton at Elizabeth Harris, Byron Kim at Max Protetch, Alexander Ross at Marianne Boesky and at David Nolan and Tabaimo at James Cohan.

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ALEXANDER ROSS
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 W 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-680-9889

ALEXANDER ROSS: Recent Drawings
David Nolan Gallery
560 Broadway at Prince Street, 212-925-6190

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 27, 2008 under the heading “Alien Resurrection”

The art of Alexander Ross is contagious on many levels. Highly prolific, his labor-intensive paintings and drawings fill both the voluminous, museumlike Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea and the Soho premises of David Nolan. There is, too, a proliferation of mediums and processes, especially in his works on paper, which have now come to include collage. His imagery is concerned with strange growth patterns, with odd cellular structures metastasizing, imparting an ominous sense of alien substances spreading like the plague. Above all, though, it is his aesthetic impact that feels diseaselike. His giddy surfaces are icky, sickly, and yet addictive.

Mr. Ross, who was born in 1960, came to art world attention in the late 1990s with imagery and a modus operandi that arrived fully-fledged and has remained you might almost say relentlessly consistent, as the display at David Nolan, which includes a room of earlier work, demonstrates. His work is populated by structures that are poised disconcertingly between the organic and the synthetic. A typical painting depicts a cluster of gooey, globular shapes that could equally be thought to have been pulled together by some erratic gravity, or else to have grown out of each other, following their own perverse morphology.

Irritatingly, for viewer and reviewer alike, the works are all untitled, but, somehow, that is of a piece with Mr. Ross’s unlovely aesthetic: These are anonymous, alien forms that discourage familiarity or empathy at any level.

Mr. Ross has evolved a way of working that entails a back and forth between specificity and generalization. He constructs elaborate models from Plastecine, photographs the models, then paints from the photographs. The drawings would seem to entail a freer, more improvisatory method.

He uses paint in a way that captures the forms’ sweat and has them glow in an intense, sickly light. His palette, like the forms themselves, trades in ambiguity, with greens that suggest vegetal growth but avoid healthy, terrestrial associations: It is the unnatural nature of a science-fiction imagination. The compositions are completely scaleless: These forms could be microscopic or the size of planets. But while scale cannot be determined, the view is always cropped: Whether honing in or offering a long view, it is implied that the form or constellation of forms continues. The implication of bigger forms intruding into the space of his drawings is accentuated, in a series at Nolan from 2007, where the bottom left corner is diagonally “amputated” as artist Carroll Dunham describes it in the exhibition catalog.

Using the gallery’s accession numbers, “Boesky 1729” (2007) is an 8-foot-high canvas in portrait format, a close-up that fills the whole composition with meticulously rendered skin. “B2071” (2007), by comparison, is a tight cluster of irregularly shaped little green nuggets wedged together in an almost circular shape, with a set against a pale blue (sky-like) ground. You get the sense of each form’s having been pinched or perforated. Similarly, in “B1212” (2006) the grooves and faceting of each form has connotations of folds and creases that are more animal than vegetable. In this composition, six distinct personages cluster together in a closely cropped all-over view, and unusually include, along with the familiar green hues, a purple, an orange, and two blues. “B2273” (2008) looks like a corner of a much bigger constellation that might be moving into the picture space. While the surrounding space is the sky-like pale blue, achieved in scumbled, painterly brushstrokes, at the bottom left of the composition, a negative space between green blobs is brash scarlet, put down in a jolting matte finish that suggests a totally different space, in a different dimension.

At multiple levels, Mr. Ross is a collapser of dualities. Stylistically, he combines high and low artforms, relating equally to art historical precedents and popular science fiction illustration. His nebulous forms hover between abstraction and representation: At a literal level, they are representations of abstract forms, painted as they are from his photographs of actual, made objects; within the realm of imagery, however, they are abstractions of somehow credible forms with a life of their own.

Art historically, Mr. Ross’s touchstone is Surrealism, but, there again, in his embrace of a movement that contained competing attitudes towards method and mode, he offers synthesis in place of dialectics. Surrealist painters were split between those, like René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí, who depicted surreal themes — dreams, desires, the uncanny — in tight style, whether illustrational or academic, and others, like Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, who, though dealing with similar imagery, embraced modernist approaches that embodied the Surrealist ideals of automatism and chance effects as ways of triggering unconscious forces.

Mr. Ross’s method combines elements of both tendencies, and looks to or like images of all the artists mentioned. There is a stand-off sense of cool, rational depiction at work in the realization of images that exist a priori. But there is also a sense that the act of making in turn triggers ways that forms can grow. In Mr. Ross, in other words, there is an organic unity between form and content.

A consistent feature of Mr. Ross’s paint handling is that in selective areas he builds up what register as contours on a weather map or gradational models. This impasto is highly deliberated and therefore conceptual rather than painterly. And yet, it has a visceral effect, making for engaging, present surfaces that trigger emotional responses.

If his skill and calculation as a painter makes for workmanlike, unloved surfaces, they also make sense of his project, his coolness, his weirdness. In graphic works, Mr. Ross comes back to a different sort of life. More freely inventive, they encourage him to collide languages. Ever medium-specific, he taps different sensibilities with each tool or substance, allowing for contrastive emotional distances and degrees of investment. But still, in his production-compulsion he is like an automaton. It is as if his own, weird creations are extraterrestrial taskmasters.

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