ED MOSES - NO WORKS

Seiler + Mosseri-Marlio Galerie is proud to present for the first time No Works by American artist Ed Moses. Moses (*1926 in Long Beach, California) has an extensive and complex relationship with painting, and his lyrical abstractions of the 1950s and 1960s form a major and self-sustaining body of work. He has been exhibiting since 1949, and was part of the original group of artists exhibiting with the Ferus Gallery in 1957. Since then he has shown in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia. Museum collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Menil Foundation, Houston, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.

In his paintings Ed Moses is interested in a deeply primal and transformative mode of awareness and perception. It is the wellspring of art making, the place from which the attempt is launched to achieve a momentary reconciliation between consensus reality and the hallucinatory chaos of the “no self”.

A physical description of the process of making these paintings will be helpful in understanding the internal impulses of the artist (if such a thing can be fully understood). It is important to state that a written description of this process may mislead the reader into thinking of it in linear terms. Better to understand it as circular and experimental.

The left and right panels of each painting are made autonomously. Each day many panels are produced in which Moses attempts an immediacy that is spontaneous and full of physical action: pouring, dripping, run-offs, washings, turning the canvas over, printing back onto the canvas from pools of run-off paint. Here is where reconciliation begins. Moses has a desire to materialize the elusive ideal painting at the end of the tunnel. But in order to stalk that painting he cannot head directly for it. It has to be found, not pre-conceived. Building peripheral vision through layered physical process is the way to open up the hunt and allow the transmutation of the goal.

The later part of the painting day is spent trying out marriages between the panels. Moses looks for the moment when two panels collide and form a gestalt. In examining that moment, he talks about a conversation between two disparate yet associative elements. As in the weave of the forest combining with the mythic projections of the human mind, a luminosity occurs between the right and left hemispheres of the paintings. This fragile balance acts as a catalyst. The paradox of being both an isolated mind and a related mind is accepted, not abolished.

Seiler + Mosseri-Marlio Galerie will show a selection of the artist’s newest works, all of them created within the last few months at his studio in Los Angeles. The setting will be an industrial stage, with peepholes allowing only limited sight from outside the gallery, similar to a construction site, which Ed sees as metaphor for his work and ultimately his life as artist.

Jill Giegerich

Ed Moses - No Works