Ed Moses, Untitled (Red), Untitled (Yellow), Untitled (Black), 1975
Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches and 43 x 43 inches
November 9 — December 9, 2007
Ed Moses flatly posits that he is not an artist. “I’m a painter, inventive, activated. An abstract painting is not a reference; it’s not a picture; it’s a perception of the painting. It goes back to Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?” For Moses, his monochromatic paintings “are a conceptual ideal of an abstract painting, existing on a two-dimensional plane. They are not painterly paintings, not painted by hand. They are the physical evidence of an abstract painting as a physical phenomenon. They have no reference nor do they exist as a referent to anything other than how they visually exist. Those paintings were executed in 1975.”
Today, he works obsessively, over and over, in exploring abstract painting as a physical phenomenon. His “monos” are ephemera-like Newman’s, the subject is pure and vibrant color on a surface. However, Moses goes one further, reducing his surfaces to murmured discourses about the nature of painting itself. One could say they are illusions of paintings, and serve to identify a mass of pigment and form upon a two-dimensional scaffold as painting. The difference, as Moses sees it, between being an artist and a painter is one of discernment: He would contend that an artist makes things that look like, or at the very least make allusion to, other things. Moses, on the other hand, sees his job as reducing everything to one color, one surface, one painting. With two assistants keeping him constantly busy in the studio, he works “wet on wet,” like a geneticist ever in pursuit of that spark of life that activates our DNA. What is it, Moses would have the viewer ask, that characterizes a painting?…