Adam Ross at Angles

Adam Ross's pictures have a futuristic feel that is conveyed through elegant combinations of abstract and architectural motifs drawn from modernist traditions as diverse as the dreamscapes of Yves Tanguy and the visionary designs of Bruno Taut.

The five paintings in this show (all from 2005) involve a complex range of pictorial elements on either black or red backgrounds. Hard-edge, vertically elongated forms play a key role. Extending from both the top and bottom of the canvases, they resist easy identification as buildings. In one of the black-ground works, Complete Control #1, these stretched-out forms compete with luminous and amorphous imagery that alternately resembles billowing smoke and serpentine chains of drifting jellyfish. Also present are lopsided columns or cylinders in metallic shades of blue, gray and rust. Other more abstract images include dots, long capsules, ellipses and the occasional instance of painterly gestures such as splatters. Ross does a wonderful job of blending these components into optically confusing compositions.

In the black works, motifs frequently are arranged and twisted into forms that subtly suggest jagged ruins or precarious wreckage, a connotation enhanced by the accompanying smoke and darkness. In Complete Control #2, one thick metallic column serves as a base for a striving dark red form that is comparable to the peak of the Freedom Tower planned for Ground Zero. However, these allusions to disaster are always in dialogue with less somber elements, as when, in one painting, the faint white outlines of a tree are visible beneath a plume of smoke.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group