Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Sep 16, 2011; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8

career of being CONTRARY Ed Moses at 85 is just as interesting an artist as he was when in college Art Issues

MALIN WILSON-POWELL

For the Journal

At age 85, Ed Moses continues his modus operandi of resisting categorization. A spontaneous rebelliousness surfaced in his first art class at Long Beach City College andmorphed into a combustible disdain for his instructors at the University of California, Los Angeles, where it took him eight years to complete his master’s degree, in1958. In 1957, the gestural abstract paintings made to satisfy his degree requirements were the subject of his first exhibition — a recognition that no doubt increasedthe aggravation of his professors at the then-fledgling and now legendary Ferus Gallery.

Moses has made a career out of being contrary, as well as taking up a lot of space. There is a persistent romantic 19th-century legacy among many significant20th-century modernist painters that casts the artist as a medium in an aesthetic practice probing the intuitive, immediate and independent. For decades, Moses hasdismissed his role as artist and claimed as his model the unknowable shaman painters of the paleolithic Lascaux cave paintings. He visited the site in southern Francewith a Los Angeles contemporary art group led by Walter Hopps before the caves were closed to the public in 1963.

Moses’ current series at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art features three large diptychs and seven major canvases. All are BIG and BOLD, and mostly BRIGHT. They are yetanother iteration of the unpredictable swerves and shifts the artist prefers to characterize as mutations. Moses spun this body of paintings off reproductions of the DeSitjl paintings of Theo van Doesburg, the founder of that Dutch movement. In 1913, after reading Kandinsky’s “The Spiritual in Art,” van Doesburg realized he want tocreate a more spiritual level of painting originating from the life of the mind and that abstraction was the only logical outcome. In contrast, Moses’ swashbucklingpaintings have almost always come out of a vigorous engagement with the act of painting itself, at a time when all the promises of purity of intention and the glories ofabstraction have been shattered on every front.

Most directly these Moses paintings fracture the De Stijl ideal of pristine blocks of primary color that represent man’s higher self. According to the gallery press release,Moses saw early Mondrian paintings on exhibit with “surfaces fissured by age, and (he) set about finding a way to create those kinds of cracks in the studio.” Anotherobvious reference is Moses’ decades-old practice of painting outside on a deck in southern California, presumably through constant minor temblors, and perhaps evenmajor tectonic shifts, in the region’s alwaysready-to- shake, rumble, and roll active earthquake zone. This is an interesting twist on being a plein air painter, analignment with the “forces of nature” rather than the look of nature. And, so the metaphors multiply for viewers depending on their personal referents. For example,what of the human tendency to carry on with business as usual while the very ground and ideas we stand upon crack apart?

There is an adroit usage of craqueleur here — sometimes with a fragilelooking surface resembling the scale of a muddybottomed lake that has been rapidly evaporatedby drought with a smooth underneath layer of very delicate crazing as found on a refined Chinese ceramic. By this point in his long life, even though he may be changingthe “look” of his paintings with each new body of work, Moses can rely on his decades of moment-by-moment discernment.

Although Moses may shudder at the thought, all of his works have been consistently about sensation and experience, a legacy of the Abstract Expressionists he publiclyesteems, including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Milton Resnick. Like them, his impulse is to present an encounter with specific material facts, a singularincarnation of sensory qualities. To do this he uses a continuum or juxtaposition of color, textures, weight and buoyancy, velocity and stability.

Last Saturday afternoon, after Friday’s opening, the garrulous Moses held forth in a predictably unpredictable conversation with David Chickey, the publisher anddesigner of the first major monograph of the painter’s restless, risk-taking productions. Radius Books released the book in 2009 — and, as so often happens with SantaFe’s premier art book publisher –– they took all their cues from the artist’s temperament and preferences to realize the feel and tone of the publication. The book is animposing, oversized physical object, a specific sensual experience that separates the painter’s distinct bodies of work rather than presenting a seamless, sequentiallineage. The text is inserted between the different styles of paintings, and was built popcorn-style by asking eight artist and curators familiar with Moses’ work to submitinterview questions. These questions were then shuffled and selected at random to elicit his more-often-than-not irascible responses.

Moses aspires to live within the perpetual “Be Here Now” moment that came to the fore in American 1960s youth culture with his own proclivity for “playing with chaos,”and has been a serious student of Tibetan Buddhism for decades. The current van Doesburg variations pick up a thread of visually cracked surfaces he first explored in a1963 group of large graphite-andacrylic series represented by “The Rose #6” in the monograph.

Moses’ example of a dynamic life dedicated to chance and taking up unlikely zigs and zags has made him a model for generations of younger artists who do not want tobe pigeonholed. A foundational figure in the generation of Californiabased artists that established Los Angeles as a protean international art center, the versatility ofMoses’ panting styles means his work is sure to be included in many of the Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time 60-plus exhibitions –– 52 of them opening by thisDecember. If you go

WHAT: Ed Moses: “ASAP & Friends”

WHERE: Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, in The Railyard at 554 S. Guadalupe St. WHEN: Through Oct. 8.

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; noon-5 p.m. Saturdays. Sundays and Mondays by appointment.

CONTACT: 505-989-8688

Monograph: Ed Moses, Essay by Barbara Haskell. Foreword by Frances Colpitt (Santa Fe: Radius Books; 192 pages, 120 four-color illustrations): $65.

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COURTESY CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART

“Frackle” (left panel), a 2011 acrylic, oil and glue on canvas, and “Real Oil Paint” (right panel), a 2011 oil on canvas, are two recent paintings by Ed Moses.

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“Untitled (Branco, Yellow Grid)” is a 2011 acrylic and glue on canvas by Ed Moses.

“ACM No. 2” is a 2011 acrylic and glue on canvas by Ed Moses.

“Frack Van Dos Berg (diptych)” is a 2011 acrylic and glue on canvas by Ed Moses.

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