mid-2000s even echo the micro-macrocosm relationships established in the paintings of the mid-80s.) But these new paintings move away from the New York work’s fixed, dialectical relationships. They do not tell you what you are looking at, they ask you what you are looking at. The availability of light throughout the fabric of southern California life had re-kindled in Moses the perceptualist thinking of his father’s generation – and the materials with which he was already working were tailor-made for realizing this undertaking. The “wave” paintings, in their many two- and three-dimensional forms, constitute the bulk of Moses’ art in California. But, of course, they continue to evolve – in structure and meaning as well as in appearance. In one recent series he has incorporated images appropriated from Renaissanceand Baroque-era textbooks on Alchemy, a “pseudo-science” (or, if you would, art) concerned with the transformation of elements. Moses thus declares his debt to conjurers of yore. In another series, still current, the agglomerations of meandering lines and elusively colored passages that normally spread across entire surfaces now curve around themselves and form odd, balloon-like shapes silhouetted against a monochrome ground. It is as if the ocean or the sky or the universe itself has suddenly puckered into a thing, a ball of energy, a zone of circulation, a comet or incipient black hole burgeoning before your eyes. The limitless horizon now curves unto itself. Apparently, goes the latest thinking among astronomers, space is not curved. It is flat, endless, and expanding at an increasing rate of speed. This provides a metaphor for Andy Moses’ artmaking, but not the only metaphor. In Moses’ work, space is curved and not curved, endless and depthless, invisible and optically all-encompassing. These aren’t just pretty pictures designed to seduce, however: their source in physics and astronomy, philosophy and even alchemy is hard-won, through years of Moses’ thought and research. And the results of that research pack a wallop.
Peter Frank Los Angeles January 2017