The luminous, light-infused paintings of Gerard Mosse celebrate illumination as experienced within modernist painting and, more recently, as seen in the visionary art of such artists as James Turrell and the neon-light constructions of Dan Flavin. While Mosse does not imitate in any way the work of these artists, his paintings look to parallels of intensity in the way that color can be suffused with incandescence—to use catalogue essayist Carter Ratcliffe’s term for Mosse’s project in general. His essential structure—the establishment of vertical columns of color with hued highlights approximately one-third from the top of the bars—is repeated in paintings that suggest the minimalist appraisal in their bare forms. The verticality of the bars intimates the figure in simplified shapes, while the color seems to exist for itself, as a bit of joyous expressiveness justifiable on its own terms. Mosse, a long-time New Yorker, inevitably invokes the bare structures of minimalism, a movement that mostly happened in New York; however, he extends the austere language of his immediate forebears in the direction of the sublime.

The sublime must be mediated, or translated, into something visible—in Mosse’s case it is a redefining of color, as well as an understated exploration of perspectival depth, enabling him to create numinous fields of light, with the columns extending into an atmospheric background. Mosse achieves a mystical connection with light; as Ratcliffe puts it, “As color becomes light, existence illuminates itself.” The danger of working this way is that the existential experience of incandescence can lose focus, giving way to an inchoate haze. Yet Mosse eschews pure emotionalism in the form of color alone; there is a fineness of perception, rooted in perspective, and a sharp idiom of color, based in the tradition of New York art, that cuts through perceptual and conceptual materialism. Instead of vagueness or vacuity, what the viewer sees is a controlled experiment in light, in color, in form. Mosse, who originally came to New York from North Africa, is reinterpreting Flavin’s purist experiments with light within the medium of painting—oil on linen. This enables him to describe the moment when color becomes something as indefinable as light.

Bending to Catch the Light (2009-10) consists of three solid columns, two painted a reddish orange, and the third a dark gray. Up toward the top of each column is a brilliant yellow band of light that shines across the composition, toward the viewer. One thinks of these forms as sentinels, thicker versions of Barnett Newman’s zips; the yellow occurs in a hue of sharp intensity, directing the eye toward the supposed head of the figure. Behind the columns are other columns that are gray or pink in color; however, the three front forms have a penumbra of pink. These rows of rectangular forms easily exist as self-enclosed abstraction, but, at the same time, they do not reject the inference of figuration. Open Blue (2008) also has a set of columns ranging in color from a dark to a luminous blue, with the color becoming lighter as it mounts the second half of the form. The composition might signify a pure abstraction, or partially abstracted figures, or the world of the sea and its odd forms of life. Mosse’s real emphasis, however, comes from the way the light is caught and held as if it were a tangible entity—surely an achievement for the color the artist has applied!

In Step into Light (2008-09), the red sentinels, set on either side of a central dark-green form, seem to be forming a crowd around the differently colored figure. Mosse layers the colors many times to achieve the luminosity of his compositions, which exist as memories of light and its effect on the audience. Here shadow forms give the viewer the sense that the columns are hanging in mid-air; this small bit of trompe l’oeil makes the painting that much more interesting. Also hanging in the show are a number of black and white works, which reenact the pattern of tall columns emanating light near the top of their form. Throughout the show, Mosse is an artist of craft and intelligence; he refuses to give up figuration for pure abstraction, creating a contrast and tension that is memorable.

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In The Klein Blue Performance by Madeleine Hatz, the artist, working with IKB paint and attired in lyotards of similar hue, paints a large drop canvas with her hands and feet, dripping and printing the paint around the contours of her own body. She pays homage to the anthroprometries of Yves Klein while correcting the sexism of the French master, who used comely, naked young models as his instruments, by having the artist be her own brush. (If only such brushes were available at Pearl Paint!) A hint of the dionysiac via Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy might come to mind from the photographs of these performances, but that’s deceptive: With a Jordi Savall soundtrack, the experience is decidedly meditative. Hatz gave her performance in Williambsurg June 11 under the auspices of Creative Thriftshop and repeats it July 22 at 6pm at Elga Wimmer, 526 West 26, # 310, where her small YKB Ceilings series of paintings are part of that gallery’s Summer show.

This was an artcritical PIC in July 2009.

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July 5 to September 6, 2008

What do we do when the experience of nature itself is changing to a point where climatic conditions have grown both bizarre and dangerous? Curated by gallerist Elga Wimmer, “Nature Interrupted” begins with a troubling notion, namely, that our treatment of the external world has created a toxic environment that cannot be rescued. Indeed, some of the art is heavily apocalyptic, being inspired by natural events that are not imagined but very real: the flooding of New Orleans, caused by a hurricane; and the tsunami that overwhelmed Southeast Asia, causing the deaths of more than 200,000 people. While it is sometimes hard to peg the art being shown to an actual event, the message is clear: we are destroying our environment in ways that are resulting in permanent change. Coming from several different countries, the twelve artists* in the exhibition have been at pains to express both the beauty of nature and the sometimes sublime attributes of its devastation. Because many of these images are magically transcendent in their expression, even when they document environmental atrocities, one could easily downplay the damage that has been done. But that would undo the premise of the show, which is to demonstrate just how much injury has been done, much of it apparently irreparable.

Nature, which furnishes our imagination with metaphors, what we call figurative language, is on the edge of disaster. Global warming is already here, no longer a distant reality. Artists, like everyone else in the world, are worried about the consequences of global warming in the natural world; moreover, they realize that the damage is psychic and imaginative as well as terribly real. We look to nature for a nearly limitless repository of metaphor, using its imagery to invigorate our prose and poetry. Destruction of our natural resources thus becomes a matter affecting not only physical reality but also the imagination, central to artists’ inner lives. In this sense, “Nature Interrupted” constitutes a warning to its viewers of the threat to our survival we ourselves have brought about, as well as a valiant attempt to maintain high standards of creativity in an increasingly diminished world. Wimmer’s choice of artists helps us navigate the disturbed terrain of our situation, which day by day grows more insistently troubled. Her show demands that we look at work suggestive of a reality that is hard to bear and even harder to honestly contemplate.

Joan Backes offered a carpet of leaves taken from places all over the world. Large and set down flat on the ground, the carpet reminds us of the remarkable beauty of fallen leaves—from trees whose survival may well be threatened. Backes also contributed a series of small paintings that render the bark of different trees that also are in danger of dying as a species. Backes’s technical skill, evident in her small panels, poignantly reminds of the beauty we will be missing in a short time; her work documents the diversity that is being taken away from us. The artist’s thoughtful works are well deserving of scrutiny; they highlight the ongoing destruction of nature by being highly specific renderings of a landscape that will most likely change permanently within our lifetime. Alexis Rockman contributed one painting to the show: Capitol Hill (2005). The work, a smallish acrylic on canvas, points out the effects of nature taking over the Capitol, which is covered by a kind of green moss. Rocks, yellow flowers, trees, and foliage make up half the painting in the foreground. Nature is out of control, ironically swamping Capitol Hill, the site of much inaction and indifference regarding the fate of our environment.

Helen Brough’s pencil drawings on vellum are so beautifully rendered the viewer almost forgets the destruction accompanying the phenomena she depicts. In Deluge #1 (2007), she has drawn a long wave erupting into foam after peaking in height; the view of the long curl of the breaking wave tends to distance the viewer from what is happening. But, one hopes, distance is not the same as indifference; as the wave falls upon shallow water, we remember just how powerful the sea is—and how unresponsive it is to those caught in its grips. Here nature is an untamable force. Osmo Rauhala’s video projection of a flock of birds beginning to rise as a swarm above fields lingers in mind as a collective portrait of group behavior, although one wonders whether we will continue to see such sights as time goes on. Jon Elliott’s painting, entitled Plague of Excess (2006) presents his audience with a reddish sunset that is quite menacing and also quite beautiful. In the center of the composition we see televisions falling into the water, whose red color suggests lava or radioactivity. This is an image not of impending but of actual apocalypse, expressed by a resonant color scheme.

All the artists in “Nature Interrupted” contribute to a greater environmental awareness. It seems, however, that nature remains fecund, capable of extraordinary beauty, even when its vulnerability is being emphasized. The show’s imagery occupies a wide range, including such desolate images as Katie Holten’s desolate sculpture, The Black Tree (2005), made with cardboard and black gaffer’s tape; and Chus Garcia-Fraile’s Protected Zone (2007), a photographic print in which an escalator leading nowhere has been placed among the dark greens of forest foliage. These images are meant to warn, but they inadvertently seduce with their beauty as well. Wimmer’s point, that nature cannot stand up to our destructive activities, remains true, although oddly the attractiveness of the work tells a different story, one of affirmation and even hope. Even in decline, the natural world is glorious.

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