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Joe Winter
John Rosis, It Canââ¬â¢t Wait. Courtesy of Westchester GalleryIn an exhibition titled Finding Form, it seems safe to assume the artist’s concerns favor process over product. Given that reverse glass paintings dominate the exhibition in number, if not scale, a meditation on the logistics and perceptible effects of this medium would seem to be in keeping with the spirit of this quiet, process-oriented exhibition.
Consider the process of reverse glass painting, whereby paint is deposited on one side of a piece of glass, the reverse side of which is presented to the viewer. The literal “reverseness” of this process is twofold: first, the painting’s final composition will be mirrored, whereby the artist’s right becomes the viewer’s left; second, the first marks made by the artist are immediately and perhaps irrevocably fore grounded. Deletions are clumsy and seldom undetectable. The relationship between the artist’s stroke and the viewer’s experience is indirect. The “flattening” effect of the glass disconnects any gesture made from the visible effects it has on the finished painting. Even if that disconnect is quickly bridged by the artist flipping the piece of glass to examine the results of a recent mark, consider the suspense, the possible elation, disappointment, befuddlement, or surprise afforded by the mark’s reveal.
The variety of gestures in Rosis’ paintings celebrate the unpredictable effects of the paint’s interface with the glass; the crisp divisions between these distinctly variegated areas bring to the fore the artist’s ability to deliberately manipulate this entropic mixing process. The glass, for its part, offers a perfectly flattened surface for the viewer’s inspection, furnishing information about each mark by effectively cross-sectioning the gestures accrued on its reverse side.
Rosis’ forms are fragmented, crystalline. Each painting consists of a few large, angular, sharply delineated zones, sometimes cut across by intruding veins of contrasting color. Within these distinct zones, color has been deposited in a variety of ways, and the effects of the glass on these distinct gestures are palpable. There are areas of fully opaque monochrome: color flows across the glass with a stroke-less fluidity. Elsewhere, viscous color is heaped on, doubling over itself to produce crevasses, hollow vesicles trapping air between paint and glass. In other areas, color combinations appear arrested in various states of mid-mix, as the glass serves doubly as canvas and palette: swirls of distinct colors grade into fully mingled, intermediate hues. Other zones seem to feature color residues left by past layers incompletely scraped away, or trace colors from a previous stroke trapped in the bristles of a brush.
Rosis’ gestures are at once instantly fossilized and thin-sectioned for viewing by the glass on which they are painted. Thus, the process provides the ideal site for this artist’s formal experiments, whereby each gesture can be considered, analyzed, and evaluated. The results of Rosis’ experiments, exhibited in Finding Form, herald an artist who manages to maintain tight control over his materials while preserving a sense of surprise when those materials yield unexpected results.
