Peter Clothier

Veteran painter Ed Moses has always thumbed his nose at the fast changing fashions of the moment, blazing his own high-risk trail through the minefields of contemporary abstraction. A major 1996 retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art reinforced his reputation as a painter whose sheer mastery of the art of exacting, Zen-like spontaneity in paint rivals that of that other West-Coast maverick, Sam Francis. Now Moses follows that feat with a spectacular new body of work, mostly under the series title "Vision Catcher."

These large-scale paintings typically set one or more highly energized, translucent forms-Moses refers to them as "tubes"-against a washy stained and spattered ground, evoking the image of exotic submarine life-forms whose elegant bends and surprising twists and torques seem determined by the movement of a powerful unseen force. What makes these paintings edgy is that each component element flirts with disaster: exuberant color choices that risk clash or gaudiness, stains whose merging and transitions could result as easily in incoherence as in eye-seducing subtlety. Created by dragging paint under squeegee pressure across the surface of the canvas, the prominent tubes themselves are risky gestures, their illusion of depth reinforced by their folds and turns, and by the thick, rich pooling of paint where the movement ends, leaving the impression of the opening of an elongated sac.

Moses' impeccable sense of the unique presence of each painting led him to locate an arched drywall divider midway in the rectangular gallery space, forming a proscenium that effectively masked off paintings from visual overlap, and through which the works at each end could be seen from afar in spectacular singularity. This austerity of presentation offered the viewer what Moses' paintings themselves seem to invite: slow, deliberate contemplation with ever-unfolding awareness, a journey filled with visual surprises and delights.

---Peter Clothier is a Los Angeles based art critic and has written numerous  articles, art reviews, art catalogues, book reviews, and essays.