Works by Alexander Ross, Lari Pittman, and Elizabeth Murray installed

[Left to right] Alexander Ross, Untitled, 2003; Lari Pittman, Untitled #11, 2003; Elizabeth Murray, Truth, Justice and the Comics #2,1990]

The starting point is pretty uncomplicated. Take some green plastic modeling clay and make something out of it, something that reflects the pressure of the fingers and in general recalls geological or organic forms. Then paint a picture of it. But from the same or similar balls of green putty an untold number of bulging, dented shapes can emerge-call it doodling in three dimensions. And consider that the cellular structures that are mimicked are themselves given to mutilation, which means they hint at an inexhaustible quantity of other shapes yet to come. This induces vertigo. In the gap between the small prototype and the painted image-a distance that causes the shapes to shrink or expand in the imagination like a biological specimen under a microscope or a planet through a telescope-other modulations occur. The materials and stylistic conventions of painting introduce fillers that alter perception even more. If the touch is direct and gestural and the pigments are unctuous and pasty, the surface starts to resemble the quality of putty as if the moceling activity that created the prototype were continuing on the canvas. But if the paint is applied in smooth lozenges the surface has the feel of faceted linoleum. If the background is a geometric pattern it may remind the viewer of a certain kind of abstraction-say, Op art-while the a la prima green thing may summon thoughts of Manet or Giorgio Morandi. If the support is cropped, the painting becomes an object in a more aggressive sense and makes one think of shaped canvases from the 1960s, even as the green thing starts to resemble a giant insect claw and the mind soon wanders off into the realm of "Star Trek." What's grotesque about all of this? That so many apparently incongruous possibilities should inhere in anything that began with such an unprepossessing lump. But it is precisely the malleability of the two primary factors-clay and oil paint-that lends itself to such metamorphosis. Alexander Ross's sophistication resides in keeping things simple while these permutations take place and these associations accrue. Much of the grotesque is overtly figurative, Ross's is just shy of being abstract but always threatens to take on a life of its own.

The more extravagant the rose, the sharper and more plentiful the thorns. This is not, in fact, a law of nature but in the hothouse world of Lari Pittman's paintings, something like this equation between visual pleasure and emotional sting applies. The pleasure comes from many sources: the coolly jazzed overallness of his compositions; the marquetry-like embedding of complex, but always crisp forms; the retinal buzz of fine-tuned tints and shades that, in themselves, often tend toward the spectrum's minor keys but, in combination, have the effect of dissonant wall-of-sound chords; and the keen appreciation for, and deft revamping of, graphic anachronisms. In the latter category are various motifs and pictorial devices gleaned from 1940s commercial art that, in contrast to the hard-sell graphics favored by classic Pop, tend toward the faux-elegance of fifth-hand Rococo, fourth-hand colonial American, third-hand genteel Victorian, and second-hand Golden Books-style semi- abstract cartooning. Textural shifts and strong contrasts of light and dark keep order among the multiple layers of Pittman's frontally sedimented imagery, while silhouetting and stenciling keep it flat. It's as if Warhol had followed his initial inclinations toward
snappy filigree and found a way to make it snare-drum tight. In addition to being the backdrop for homoerotic gestures of defiance and sexually explicit emblems of ecstasy, Pittman's horror subsumes other terrors. From the start his titles were intimations of mortality-Maladies and Treatments and From Venom to Serum are two examples from the early 1980s, when, and it's no mere coincidence, the AIDS epidemic began. Other titles resonate with faith and a longing for grace Where the Soul Intact Will Shed its Scabs. Where Suffering and Redemption Will Sprout from the Same Vine, or the series called A Decorated Chronology of Insistence and Resignation. The pictures from the latter group also contain scatological symbols and texts such as "Cum N' Git It! Untitled #11 is notably reticent by comparison. Words tell us nothing this time, but the contorted flesh-tone tree to the left and the flame-like branches of the one to the right, coupled with the fact that both are turned upside down in a setting that also includes a clawlike gardener's tool and a hospital drip next to the central armchair, gives the ensemble a harsh, if not frankly morbid feel. So much to excite the senses, so much pain.

Still-life is the format in which artists focused on this assumption and its consequences. These diverse points of reference are, synoptically, the predicates for Elizabeth Murray's paintings-the habit of thinking that things stay put, the greater awareness that they will not. Cézanne has contributed to her dialectical pictorial statements of these competing realities, as have Dali, Miró, and Disney as well as the gestural vernacular of the streets. Heretofore, though, no one working in the "flat" mediums of painting and drawing has found a way to render the convolutions of fracturable objects (Cubism) and reversible spaces (Surrealism) in three as well as two dimensions. Murray's done it. The flexing quality of her reliefs is the result of the physical and perceptual contradictions they incarnate and the measure of their vigor.

Text written by Curator Rob Storr for the exhibition catalog.