|
Olivier Mosset Recent Paintings, By Richard Tobin, THE Magazine, 2000 Eye candy. That may be all a viewer gets from this work, but it's proof enough of the power of painting to delight the senses. And the monochromatic paintings of Olivier Mosset certainly do that. Each of the five large paintings occupies an alcove wall of the gallery. Each canvas, mounted on plywood backing, is painted evenly in saturated acrylic colors that either singly occupy the entire surface or pair up to divide the canvas into three horizontal color bands. In one room, a 7-by-2 I-foot cerulean-blue is set off against a 7-by-12-foot tricolor canvas with its horizontal alternation of Popsicle pink-orange-pink. In the second alcove, a similar-sized horizontal canvas pairing green-blue-green bands, cools the saturated red of a 10-by- 10-foot painting. The effect is a bit like Ellsworth Kelly on Lifesavers but the optical stimulation is maximized by the juxtaposition. The reductive tradition in modern art has increasingly left us with little to paint but a great deal to write about. For the retrospective mounted in 1998 by the Guggenheim, entitled Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, reviewers agreed on at least two points, that abstraction could be visually stunning, and that despite its great promise-or promises-abstract art never achieved Malevich's goal of "supremacy of pure feeling." As Calvin Tomkins wrote for The New Yorker, 'These are beautiful works, and they can be enjoyed as such, without theories or explanations to back them up The doubts persist, though, and they increase as you come nearer to the present day'. The elevation of the long, decorative tradition of monochrome painting to "serious" art occurred with the last great wave of Modernist abstraction represented by Minimal Art Robert Ryman's white squares, Agnes Martin's grid lines, and Elsworth Kelly's shaped canvases could be enjoyed as purely visual experiences, thanks in part to Frank Stella's earlier assertion of the literal value of his paintings, free of any claim to "humanistic values that [people] find on the canvas." Advocates of monochrome painting (mostly galleries) argue that, if viewed with a significant degree of perception, and by virtue of the optical properties of color, it is capable of creating meaning-and with that, experience. Monochrome painting testifies certainly to the artist's love of applying saturated acrylic or oil pigment to a surface, with differing degrees of haptic nuance But as for meaningful experience, maybe Tomkins got it right, referring to abstract art as a whole: 'Art...does have to evoke-or at least suggest-a world outside itself, but the history of abstraction suggests that this can be done consistently, in abstract terms, only by very great artists." |