ART REVIEW : Ed Moses: Pressing on the Outer Edges

Much of L.A.’s best art has been inspired by the city’s situation as a global border town. Located on the interface between Asian and European civilizations, the place seems to invite its artists to blend the contemplative and cyclical mentality of the Far East with the aggressive rationality of the Occident.

Richard Diebenkorn’s long series of “Ocean Park” paintings ruminated on this theme emphasizing the Euro-American tradition. John McLaughlin’s work leaned to the ambiguities of Zen, subtly undermining the West’s rigid linearity. New paintings by Ed Moses take up the theme with a surprising twist.

A dozen large works at L.A. Louver Gallery come from two recent series, “Racko” and “Edge.” Viewed with casual objectivity, they are disappointing. They seem to have started life in the artist’s mind as jerry-built, right-angle grids. Rendered in black paint on white canvas with an occasional strident yellow or sublime blue thrown in for decorative drama, they seem as vaguely familiar as a Mondrian or color-stain paintings of the ‘70s.

But something about them insists they not be left at that. There is an enticing, wacky quality in pole-like shapes whose outside edges bleed like the hair on a scared cat. Passages shaped like torn paper have weirdly repetitive staccato surfaces that make them look like fur-covered concertinas.

Mechanically, this eccentric look comes from the fact that the paintings are all rendered with a rubber squeegee. Aesthetically, it doesn’t matter. The effect is enough to make one mentally abandon the posture of objectivity and enter into the paintings’ proffered experience. That’s when they start to pay off.

Where a Diebenkorn or McLaughlin was limited to a dialogue between the contemplative and the rational, Moses introduces the apparently irrational. Extending the geographic metaphor, one might say he introduces L.A.’s north-south axis, representing its pre-Columbian heritage, which includes a tradition of ritual ferocity.

Truth to tell, however, the quality feels more personal, more like a venting of the chaos and surprise of the dreaming subconscious.

Particularly in three two-panel works from the “Racko” series, these flat, abstract paintings become both figurative and spatial. The figural aspect comes from Rorschach-like blobs and stains that invite multiple readings.

In “Racko 10,” for example, one panel at first suggests light falling on an ominous garden of writhing, phallic cobra-like forms that could only be located in the imagination. Gradually these same motifs take on the aspect of a formal, deserted urban square where the illusion of depth suggests a painted cityscape. The second panel, virtually solid black, imparts the feeling that the first image has suddenly gone dark.

Moses now ranks with the artists who preceded him as Los Angeles’ major masters. Unlike some of them, he prefers to press on exploring the aesthetic outer edges of its borders with the antic courage of the Beat Generation. He goes on dancing what he calls his “Zen boogie.”

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, through June 17. Closed Mondays, (310) 822-4955.