Gerard Mossé: Painting, 2018

GERARD MOSSÉ PA I N T I N G

Illustrated on the cover: New World Adam, 2015-2016 oil on linen 34 x 20 3/4 in, 86.4 x 52.7 cm

GERARD MOSSÉ PA I N T I N G

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Zohra’s Voice, 2005-2009 oil on linen 32 x 25 in, 81.3 x 63.5 cm

The Light This Time B y L i l l y We i Gerard Mossé is a committed abstractionist with time and space on his mind, a light in his eyes and paint on his hands. He began his career as a painter around three decades ago although, to be clear, it has always been as much about obsession as it has been about career.

Mossé was born in Casablanca and spent his childhood there and in Marseilles, steeped in Mediterranean light and color, undoubtedly instrumental in the forging of an aesthetic based on both. He went to Los Angeles as a teenager—another city deluged by sun—and started out in the film industry but while it interested him, it was never wholly satisfying. He wanted to be an artist—he had already discovered his affinity for painting and the fine arts—and eventually enrolled in the Claremont Graduate School of Arts in Claremont, California, earning an MFA in 1985. Not long after, his sense of manifest destiny unspooling in reverse, he advised himself to go East, revealing a temperament that instinctively pursues its own aims, willing to take chances.

By the time he arrived in Manhattan in 1987, he had committed himself unreservedly to painting, although it happened more “organically” than otherwise. Becoming a painter in the late 1980s was somewhat challenging, since painting seemed to have stumbled into a cul de sac with no exit. This was according to a discourse that had predicted its demise in the 1970s, its future threatened by the rapid rise of technologies that provided so many other ways to make art as well as so many new platforms for that art’s global dissemination. There was also an ideological upheaval that wanted to force art out of the academy, to evict it from its ivory tower, calling for it to be more engaged, more activist. Mossé resisted it all—pure formalism, new media, political and social art—saying that he didn’t belong to any school, at least in terms of his art. He wanted to discover and develop his own ideas, his inclinations tilting toward the quixotic, romantic, and personal, fiercely bent on exploring the world as he sees it and capturing that in his paintings. And ultimately, his choices revealed his prescience since painting, as we know, continues to exist. It is, in fact, flourishing, its predicted death, once again, prematurely proclaimed. It might have been marginalized for a time, ignored, but we are now aware of how many painters painted through that supposed dark period in painting’s history, necessitating a revision of the times. Like the misnamed Dark Ages that supposedly shrouded Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was not nearly as dark as once thought. It seems that millennia of a venerated practice was not so easily dismissed after all. And it is not only artists who are smitten by painting, but also countless others, for whom painting remains synonymous with art.

Mossé is one of those smitten artists. He has worked in a range of media that included sculpture, ceramics, and installation but it is painting and paint that he loves. His early forays into painting were figurative but he eventually turned toward abstraction as more capacious. Not only did he embrace painting over, say, film and moving images, as many artists of his generation had done, he succumbed to abstraction at a time when a new kind of figurative/narrative painting was hailed as the medium’s savior, with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Georg Baselitz as its avatars. Since then, these categories have been mostly retired. The old divide between abstraction and representation no longer ignites polemical fisticuffs, and distinctions between disciplines have blurred in an art world that is more open-ended and fluid on every level, operating in a greatly expanded field that reflects the multiplicity of contemporary points of view and its often whiplash transitions.

This, for Mossé, was all the more reason to concentrate on his own vision. It is one that valorizes color, light, brushwork, all the formal elements and a process that is meticulous. It is a process that is also insistently, even perversely slow, as if to literally fold time into his projects. Taking it slow is crucial to Mossé and to the creation of the pictorial spaces that enrich and complicate his paintings. Attention-deficit is not his problem.

This showing of his latest series of paintings—he always works in series—are some of his most sophisticated and radiant to date. Made over a period of six or seven years, he works and reworks them, returning to the paintings time and again to further refine and adjust their myriad relationships, each alteration inducing another until he is utterly satisfied, setting himself a high bar.

The paintings fall into two compositional types, the scale variable, the tonalities of the grounds alternating, some darker, some paler, the overall orientation vertical. One grouping consists of multiple vertical shapes, the other of a single vertical shape. These uprights are self-referential forms, deliberately echoing the format of the painting as paintings within paintings. But it also purposely evokes much more, the vertical images assuming figurative, totemic import.

And the viewer’s subjective associations are interactions encouraged by the artist. For Mossé, the paintings are reveries, autobiography, merging the subjective with the objective. With the exception of Zohra’s Voice, 2005-2009, Grounded, Floating, 2011-2012, is the earliest work present, displaying the transition from the brilliant, laser-like line that cuts across the surface to the discrete auras that are the hallmark of the remaining venture. The wavering multiple shapes—such painterliness another commonality, as is the luminous envelopment—seen in With Burning Patience, 2012-2016, emerge from a twilight zone, a darkened, meditative space that is somber but offers its own beauty: note the exquisite, slightly dissonant rose cabochon in the background, balanced by a jeweled blue, among other such passages.

The largest painting, the exhibition’s focal point, is a sumptuous, softly lustrous diptych inhabited by a phalanx of enigmatic verticals that stretches nearly 10 feet across and stands upright at six and a half feet. Titled From Myself to Beyond the Screen of the Sky, 2017-2018, on the one hand, its measure is more or less pegged to human corporeality and worldliness; on the other hand, in its extension and illusionistic depth, it is immeasurable. The title reinforces an impulse toward a kind of dialectic that is evident throughout the works here: the push/pull between the humanistic and the sublime, the ecstatic. Ballasted by the factuality of materials and process, they nonetheless beckon toward the ineffable.

Mossé says he always has so many questions when he begins a series. For this one, among other inquiries, he wondered if he might not be able to come to a simpler resolution using a single shape, and would it take less time? But it was not simpler, he discovered. Nor did it take less time, not for him; the four largest paintings in this series (Not Here the Darkness; Leap; Old Light, New to Me; and From the Wildness of Stars, 2015-2018) required over three years to complete. While they differ in coloration, haloed by aureoles that vary from incandescent yellowgold to pink to coral, it is the white-hot blaze at the level of the heart—if the vertical were a human figure—that immediately draws the gaze, so bright it almost sears the eye. These are the highest voltage works he has created so far, seeming to leak light, emit quanta of energy, give off heat. The surfaces are brushed, textured, the colors pack a wallop, more sensation than specific hue. The forms advancing out of and retreating into indeterminacy might be read as beacons, signposts, or a kind of spiritual/cosmic chorus, consciousness clothed in a body (like us?), an immanence that is surreal, mysterious. The paintings are almost audible—I imagined that I heard a low tintinnabulation when in their presence—recalling what the eminent Victorian critic Walter Pater once famously opined, that all art aspires to the condition of music.

Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert, 1476-1478, in the Frick Collection, is one of Mossé’s favorite paintings. He said that he “loved the skin of it, the translucency of its surface, the incredible care taken in its making.” And its beauty. He didn’t want to forget to mention beauty, which is important to him. He might also have been talking about his own paintings, to which much of what he said applies.

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Little Big Moments 2, 2011-2012 oil on linen 20 1/2 x 32 in, 52.1 x 81.3 cm 5

In that Moment (I Was a Little more Awake than Usual), 2012-2016 oil on linen 32 x 25 in, 81.3 x 63.5 cm

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For Time Being, 2015-2017 oil on linen 34 x 20 3/4 in, 86.4 x 52.7 cm

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From Myself to Beyond the Screen of the Sky, 2017-2018 oil on linen, diptych overall: 79 x 118 in, 200.7 x 299.7 cm

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Accord, 2017-2018 oil on linen 40 x 65 1/2 in, 101.6 x 166.4 cm

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Old Light, New to Me, 2016-2017 oil on linen 79 x 36 1/2 in, 200.7 x 92.7 cm 14

Not Here the Darkness, 2016-2017 oil on linen 79 x 36 1/2 in, 200.7 x 92.7 cm 15

Gathering the Light Against It, 2011-2016 oil on linen 20 1/2 x 32 in, 52.1 x 81.3 cm

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She Offered to Sing for Me, 2015-2017 oil on linen 34 x 20 3/4 in, 86.4 x 52.7 cm 18

Bird Was Higher than Moon, 2015-2017 oil on linen 34 x 20 3/4 in, 86.4 x 52.7 cm 19

Little Big Moments 3, 2011-2012 oil on linen 20 1/2 x 32 in, 52.1 x 81.3 cm

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Inscape 1, 2012-2016 oil on linen 36 x 60 5/8 in, 91.4 x 154 cm

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Generations, 2010-2016 oil on linen 32 x 25 in, 81.3 x 63.5 cm 24

Grounded, Floating, 2011-2012 oil on linen 56 x 42 in, 142.2 x 106.7 cm 25

With Burning Patience, 2012-2016 oil on linen 79 x 59 in, 200.7 x 149.9 cm

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Leap, 2016-2017 oil on linen 79 x 36 1/2 in, 200.7 x 92.7 cm 28

From the Wildness of Stars, 2016-2017 oil on linen 79 x 36 1/2 in, 200.7 x 92.7 cm 29

Inscape 2, 2012-2016 oil on linen 36 x 60 5/8 in, 91.4 x 154 cm

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Important Works available by: Twentieth-Century European Masters; Post-War American Artists

DESIGN / Dan McCann P H OTO G R A P H Y / Ja k e S m i s l o f f

P R I N T E D I N N E W YO R K B Y P R O J E C T

GERARD MOSSÉ PA I N T I N G

N o v e m b e r 2 9 - D e c e m b e r 2 9 , 2 018

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