ANDY MOSES: INTO THE LIGHT

INTO THE LIGHT - Peter Frank

Andy Moses' mysterious and alluring paintings pose a subtle challenge: do we read them as landscapes, enveloping the eye as they do with forms both aqueous and mountainous? Or should we regard them as abstractions, pure plays of light and form, color and contour, literally bent into physical space? Moses welcomes either comprehension or both. This is art born of visual transcendence, seeking to find a bit of the glory of nature in the properties of paint.  

Moses grew up in coastal Los Angeles, mesmerized almost from birth by the brilliant vagaries of marine light. When he moved east after college, he immersed himself in the booming New York art scene of the 1980s and 1990s, launching his career and determining how to explore both subject matter and material. But on his return to Venice, he found himself immersed again in the plangent light of his youth. Ever since he has striven to invest every painting with such meditative luminosity, even building round and curved (mostly concave) surfaces to envelope the eye.  

Such perceptual manipulation may be related to the Light & Space movement (whose participants have been Moses’ neighbors his whole California life), but in its reliance on paint it evinces associations with the abstract impressionism of Mark Rothko and the color field canvases of Morris Louis. Ultimately, Moses follows in the footsteps of Claude Monet and JMW Turner, whose contemplations of urban and rural spaces were pretext to a hunt for light itself.  

This exhibition surveys Andy Moses’ work of the last two decades, evincing his increasingly expansive commitment to a kind of painting that at once displays and obscures imagery. This work forces you to decide what it is doing to you, what it is showing you, if and how it is tricking your eyes or playing to their strengths. It’s a kind of magic. 

Andy Moses: Into the Light is organized by Laguna Art Museum and curated by Peter Frank.