Gerard Mosse at Kathryn Markel

Gerard Mosse's brand of abstraction is still in thrall to formal elements--color, shape, scale, space, materiality, mark and (in particular) light--elements that have long constituted the phenomena of his meticulously constructed paintings. In this exhibition of recent oils--eight paintings on canvas, three works on paper--Mosse concentrates on the rectangle, painting's portable, iconic shape from the Renaissance onward, first as the support, then reiterated as motif. Most often, one rectangle is floated over another and another, situated high, their outlines softened, blurred--paintings telescoped within paintings. The surfaces of these works consist of a fine, seductive skin that shifts from the opaque to the lustrous and delicately transparent.

Comprising layers of colors, although resolved into more or less one surface hue so that each rectangle is a monochrome of sorts, the palette here is most often variations--warm to cool, light to dark--of purple, rose and yellow, with yellow a constant. But Mosse sneaks in more color than that, so that the purple becomes a coral, a pink, a winey crimson, with certain forms subtly edged in earth tones. One of the largest paintings is an exception to the general color scheme. In this study in pale greenish yellow, called Yellow Pear Grey, Mosse's characteristic rectangular shapes are edged in repeated lines that break up their contours and make them seem fragile, apparitional.

Mosse's production might be considered a cross between the numinous and the lyrical, between Rothko's sublime and Redon's reveries, with a touch of Fautrier for ballast, the materiality of paint and its metamorphoses a significant part of the artist's effect. While the artificial, fluorescent colors appear somewhat garish at first and unlikely vehicles for transcendence, on closer inspection, they prove more complex, more ambiguous, with greater resonance and poetry than expected. In the end, it is the luminosity of these paintings that compels. Discourses on sensuous formality, on materiality, they also frame a metaphor for the more ephemeral, the more ineffable. At the center of these compositions, surrounded by an incandescent aura, an indeterminate shape or space looms in the place once occupied by the radiant visages of saints and gods. As paint transubstantiates into light, it parallels the mystery that exists at the heart of matter, that is the heart of the matter.

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