Alyse Rosner “Trusting the River”

Rick Wester Fine Art

poster for Alyse Rosner “Trusting the River”
[Image: Alyse Rosner "Trusting the River" (2021) conte and acrylic on raw canvas 84 x 216 in.]

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RWFA’s sixth solo exhibition of paintings by Alyse Rosner. Her first, in 2013, was the adumbrative Premonitions, intentionally scheduled with 7 Paintings, shortly thereafter. Her most recent, Day to Day reflected her quotidian practice of carrying a sketchbook with her wherever she went. On the cusp of Covid, her work was presented at Volta in March 2020, unwittingly marking the last in person gathering art weekend before the world radically changed.

Undoubtedly, art created in the dark days of last spring, until perhaps 24 months later, will be viewed through the fractured prism of coronavirus, with all the tentacles of the nasty and cruel microscopic invader seemingly attached. Rosner has absorbed the pandemic zeitgeist and psychology of the moment, creating an abstracted portrait of the era. With two commanding murals measuring seven by eighteen feet, she has created furious chromatic barrages of insistent lines accompanied by tremulations of color in a tapestry of obsessive melodic and harmonic gestures, urgently woven together, as if time might run out. These fantastical interplays of line used as building blocks of form are a calligraphic and damning defense against the scourge’s effect on our lives. Energetic, thoughtful, complex and anxious, these paintings reflect a moment when history seems to be altered daily.

The paintings included in Trusting the River were executed during a six-month residency through the Clementina Arts Foundation that granted her a vacated retail space in the Stamford (CT) Town Mall, expanding her workspace ten-fold. Extremes of scale are central to her practice, starting with miniatures executed in acrylic on 6 x 5 inch wood panels, growing to 80 x 100 inch paintings on raw canvas. Freed from the space constraints imposed by a basement studio, the opportunity to stretch out allowed Rosner to view her efforts in context of each other, undisturbed for the first time, informing her journey to complete the works.

The natural world and organic forms are intrinsically linked to Rosner’s process. For fifteen years she has incorporated graphite rubbings into her paintings, from wood grain of the deck outside her studio, to rings of a felled tree’s trunk and more recently, the outline of giant paulownia and other leaf forms which become the base and structure of her paintings. In 2006 she began painting on Yupo, a synthetic, “green” paper manufactured from polypropylene, dimensionally stable and recyclable, imbuing the work with an environmental awareness. Always a keen student of painting history, these early works were in conversation with Renaissance artists who, by including the interiors of their studios, created self-portraits by proxy. The rubbings also function as a document, photographic drawings from nature by the hand of an artist. Use of the paulownia leaves, an invasive weed that grows with abandon, is an apt metaphor for Rosner’s thick jungle-like, multi-layered imagery and for the virus’ rapid ascent to domination of our consciousness.

The panoramic murals in Trusting the River reflect Rosner’s landscape tendencies as their proportions result in paintings over twice the length of any previous work at roughly the same height. The show’s title stems from a New Yorker profile on the musician Fiona Apple whose faith in her fearless creative process inspires Rosner. The show’s titular painting from 2021 incorporates much of the mark making and acid palette that Rosner’s followers have become familiar with. However, in this work she manipulated the color field backdrop by soaking the raw canvas in her backyard, yielding an uneven and unpredictable surface for the pigment, as if it had been bathed in a river. Again, her process and materiality are wed and work as metaphor for the artist’s devotion to her craft.

Its companion piece, A Quieter Battle, 2021 is as subtle and gentle as its sister is brash and insistent. Composed mostly of muted warm tones, it’s pigment washes recede and provide the needed foil for an arabesque of deeper red, pink, peach, lavender and white chevrons that skirt across the full length of its 18-foot expanse. Where the cooler colored mural evokes water, rain and ice, A Quieter Battle is all sunshine and fire.

Decade, 2021 is a more typically sized canvas for Rosner at 74 x 92 inches. It is dense with color and impressive in its contrasts. In an unprecedented move for Rosner, she released an artist’s statement revealing the title’s source. Ten years prior, she lost her husband to cancer and through the experience she absorbed the colors of the medication, stating: [T]he phthalo green color of the time released morphine capsules I tracked for him became intrinsic to the work. After he died, my paintings, which were previously earthy and understated, filled with this dye color. Phthalo became a private memorial in the paintings, and the palette evolved in a call and response process. My innate reaction to the garish synthetic green was to add more color. Over time a heightened vibrant palette took over; an undercurrent suggesting toxicity and emotion prevailed.

Rosner’s paintings are self-referential at heart, ingenuously adhering to the impulse abstract painters have to disguise their selves for the sake of the work. Rosner’s artistic practice, however, has reached a point where she allows herself to be fully revealed and not just seen.

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Schedule

from May 06, 2021 to June 26, 2021

Artist(s)

Alyse Rosner

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