ART REVIEW - White Hot Magazine / Andy Moses: Recent Paintings

By LORIEN SUÁREZ-KANERVA September 11, 2023

Andy Moses’ Recent Paintings will be showcased at the William Turner Gallery in Los Angeles from September 9 until November 11, 2023. Moses Recent Paintings’ distinct color use encompasses a predominantly white, blue, black and gold palette. All-white color tints, shades, and their lustrous variability are at play amidst clear, sharper, fluid lines, and softer open gradations, leading toward ethereal spaces. Moses’s sensibility spans a buoyantly luminous subtlety and achieves a refined definition through a meticulously grounded and richly orchestrated embodied perception. Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed to embodied perception as the experience of the self in an environment at the crucible towards forms of relatedness that reveal meaning and expand perception.  

Geomorphology 1607, Acrylic on canvas, over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 inches, 2023

Fiber Birren, Johannes Itten, and Carl Jung address the subject of color each through a psychological vantage point, cultural nuances (like Jung’s groundbreaking study of mandalas of the East by introducing these to the West), and Color Theory. The sensorial effects of color suggest a responsive universality based on similarities that bridge cultural bounds.  In his works “Color and Meaning” and “Color and Culture,” John Cage supports these observations on color's meaningful effect on sensorial understanding across cultures.   Most salient in Moses’ works is the combination of white and blue, where black shifts through a reflective play with light toward shades of blue. From these earlier scholars' observations, colors such as whites speak of clarity, illumination, and spirituality, and blues inspire serene tranquility and introspective depth.

As a countertone, gold's earliest cultural associations with the sun's radiant power extend the hue's significance to encompass wealth and prominence. For Jung, gold represented the self's individuation process, stimulating wisdom and enlightenment—likewise, Itten and Birren associated illumination and divine inspiration with gold. Extensively, gold in East Asia, including Japanese 18th-century iconography, signifies wealth, power, good fortune, and divinity.

Geomorphology 1606, Acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 in, 2023

Moses shares the American Transcendentalists’ numinously intuitive perception of nature alongside the critical figures of Thoreau, Whitman, Emmerson, and their predecessor, the Canadian Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poetry such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s lines from his poem “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” are evident in Moses’ paintings, and they highlight a kinship, reveling in transcendental sensibilities grounded in the human experience of nature and its patterns throughout time.

 “The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands.”

Geodesy 1514, Acrylic on canvas over circular wood panel, 72 in diameter, 2023 

Longfellow summarizes this generational contribution towards a deepening receptiveness and recognition of how these contemplations become influential legacies in his poem “A Psalm of Life.”

“Lives of great men all remind us.
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time.”

Geodesy 1515, Acrylic on canvas over circular wood panel, 72 in diameter, 2023

Similarly, Moses perceived an affinity and kinship from the East with Ryukyuan lacquerware for its craftsmanship and conceptual design motif through his introduction while viewing LACMA’s “The Five Directions: Lacquer from the Ryukyu Islands” exhibition. This iconography and the craft itself of creating a painstaking layering of resin polished into lacquer was characteristic of Japan’s Ryukyu Islands from the 18th century.  The motif speaks of benevolent mystical forms seeking wisdom in East Asian cultural iconography. One particular piece in LACMA’s exhibition, a circular tray, inspired his painting titled Geodesy 1515. The matter of the enlightenment is also poetically crafted as an adornment – Dragons Chasing the Flaming Pearl. The Flaming Pearl holds as its essence the themes of wisdom within a spiritual scope. At the same time, the dragons culturally appear as strong protective forms that control natural elements.

Circular Tray with Dragons Chasing a Flaming Pearl, Black Lacquer on Wood Core with Mother of Pearl Inlay, 3.5 x 35.25 in, Ryukyu Islands, 1700-1800, LACMA Permanent Collection.

The American transcendentalist ethos, presented in the poem “Come, said my soul” by Whitman, attests eloquently to their literary movements’ vision of universal unity.  Their writings draw deeply from their dedicated contemplation and communion with nature. This is akin to the sensibility the mystics have shared throughout time.

Geomorphology 1608, Acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 in, 2023

“Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after death invisibly return,
Or, long, long hence, in other sphere,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on, Ever and ever yet the verses
owning – as, first, I here and now,
Singing for soul and body, set to them by name,
Walt Whitman

Andy Moses’s paintings attest to this universal transcendence, poetically defined, and breathtakingly revealing its cultural lineage’s kinship. WM

WHITE HOT MAGAZINE - Andy Moses: Recent Works

Anthony Haden-Guest for WHITE HOT MAGAZINE

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST

Anthony Haden-Guest (born 2 February 1937) is a British-American writer, reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet, and socialite who lives in New York City and London. He is a frequent contributor to major magazines and has had several books published including TRUE COLORS: The Real Life of the Art World and The Last Party, Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night.

Andy Moses’ father, Ed Moses, was an artist with the Ferus Gallery, now enshrined as LA’s Cool School, and Andy grew up in the Santa Monica Canyon, looking out onto the ocean. He went to the California Institute of Arts, where the Death of Painting was a given and Concept art and Minimalism ruled, so for two years he worked with film and video. But an urge to pick up a brush seized him in his third year and he describes his instant conversion to pigment as a chemical rush. Upon leaving Cal Arts in 1982 he headed straightaway for New York where the break-out of the Neo-Exes had brought painting back to robust life.

Moses’ earliest work in New York were black-and-white abstractions and these were in his first exhibition at Annina Nosei. There was a distinctive edge to his project from the get-go. “I almost went into the scientific world when I was young,” Moses says. “I was very good at math and science. It’s always in the back of my mind and the way I make paintings is kind of scientific. Basically I experiment and try to figure out how paint flows.”

Such thinking entered the content too. “I was taking stories out of the New York Timesand silkscreening them on the sides of images to create complex narratives that were very much about language,” he says. “Things disintegrating, things forming. So I was kind of telling the audience what I was interested in.” The opening of a show in which he had work brought him back to Southern California in January 2000. “I fell in love with LA all over again,” he says. His New York period was done.

Moses settled first in Malibu. “It was right on the water. I used to commute to my Venice studio,” he says. “In New York I would go to Montauk. But you didn’t get the sense of infinite horizon that you get out here. There’s a point where the horizon connects with the sky. And sometimes it’s very well defined, but sometimes there’s a haze, a blur, and one thing begins to turn into another. I’m interested in that mirroring effect, of looking out into space, seeing one thing mirror another. You see it a lot in the desert, you see it a lot in the ocean.”

This got into his art. “The work shifted pretty quickly.” Moses says. “The very first ones I started doing were long and horizontal, mostly pearlescent white, and quite simple images.” He began keeping precise color notes. “I have an assistant who reads these charts and follows these tabulations,” he says. “We have thousands of pages going back years and years.”

He will begin a painting by figuring out the colors. Basing his choices on what?

“Things I’ve seen. Like things I’ve seen out in the natural world.” he says. The commutes on the Pacific Coast Highway have been a slipstream of visual event. “They are engrained on my memory. Then I focus on certain colors that might work together. What I’ll do is experiment on small paintings to see how much of these colors I should put in. It’s very interesting. Because reds and greens seem to expand, the blues seem to contract. So I have an idea what I’m going to do. But either they follow what I’m trying to get at or they don’t. And what’s cool is there is a certain amount of control but I also have to react to a situation in the moment.”

Accident being crucial.

“It’s a brand-new experience every single time,” Moses says “And that’s what makes it exciting. I don’t know what the end is going to be. I have to discover it as the paint is flowing. And react. And the paint reacts to what I do. And I react to what it does.”

He uses a dozen buckets, holding a couple of quarts of paint apiece, on each canvas. “I’ll walk around and pour in from one side and pour in from another side,” Moses says. “Everything is moving towards the center. And if I lift the painting up as it’s moving, everything will run the other way. So it is this juggling act of trying to get the sensation of everything moving towards the center. But at the same time there is a lot of circular movement that is happening.

“And other lines will be pushed by other buckets of paint. They will start to recede and come forward, which creates a three dimensional aspect. So I really never know what a painting is going to look like until it’s finished. Each one begins and ends in its own way. And there’s a million possibilities every time. And at a certain point I have to let go. And say that’s it!

“Once the color is down and the surface is all wet I can work on it for a couple of hours. It’s an intensely focused period of time. And the painting has to be done in one sitting every single time. It’s always done in a day. And it’s a long day.”

The sheer size of today’s’ art world, including the number of working artists, means that a walk-through of galleries in any art capital will reveal an acreage of beautifully-made work, sometimes described as “zombie formalism” or “crapstraction”, so that it’s almost jarring to confront the real thing. Andy Moses is not alone there – Hello, Sean Scully – but there he is, a figure in what has been described as a new Pictorialism.

“I do think it’s that,” Moses says. “Pictorialism is very much about

how things come into being. It is about energy and light turning into

matter”

Abstraction can be just that, I observed. Abstract. But abstraction

can also depict life, if not in forms with which we are familiar.

“I think so,” Moses said. “Somehow we are familiar with it and

Somehow we’re not. And I’m really trying to focus on that, the

essential force that’s all around us. I think it’s the emergence of how

we perceive images and how images come into being. And how

energy creates things – light and motion and movement. I really

want the energy of these to be the energy of the earth, the world.

Everything is dynamic, everything is changing, everything is

moving, everything is shifting ... and everything has that dynamic

aspect. You can see the world. And that it’s alive.” WM

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