Brion Nuda Rosch: New Works
September 3 - October 1, 2011
Eli Ridgway Gallery
by Zachary Royer Scholz

Brion Nuda Rosch’s second solo exhibition with gallerist Eli Ridgway builds on artworks he recently presented at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and in Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, but takes this ongoing body of work in a decidedly cerebral direction.  Rosch’s signature blend of subtle humor, delicately considered composition, and charmingly poor materials continues to define his paintings, sculptures, and collages.  However, the idiosyncratic, folk-art feel of the pieces exhibited in Atlanta and at Yerba Buena has been replaced by tighter variations within more refined parameters.

The resulting show is diverse, yet remarkably unified.  Its artworks showcase the exciting potentials emerging from Rosch’s maturing practice, and simultaneously hammer home the key aspects that make Rosch’s works not only topically relevant, but enduringly satisfying.  

The specific techniques Rosch employs—collaged images, stacked objects, geometric maskings, and surfaces painted with monochromatic house paint—have all appeared in his recent work; but in this show he has taken this habitual bag of tricks and folded it in upon itself.  Identical techniques achieve surprisingly different effects.  Brown house paint runs through the exhibition like a baseline—dabbed on printed fabrics in Abstract Painting as Dictated by Neo Primitive Print #5, geometrically collaged on top of images in Time as Concept (Infinity), and gesturally smeared on parts of free-standing works in Form Stack #19. Such material dexterity not only unifies the diverse pieces on display, but also makes less considered aspects, like pedestals and frames, integral parts of each artwork.  The resulting slippages and connections create a complexly satisfying experience that knits the exhibitions’ individual pieces into a unified conceptual mass.

Rosch’s newly methodical approach systematically elevates several threads that have previously lain dormant in his artwork.  His varied iterations repetitively assault the already fuzzy divisions between his collages, paintings, and sculptures—playfully evident in the wordless wordplay of a painting of a sculpture placed atop a photograph of a pedestal as in Rosch’s Form (Possible Portrait) Covered in Paint.  This ambiguous flexibility allows similarly framed collages to both hang on the wall as individual works, and be incorporated into freestanding sculptural amalgams.

In this show, Rosch has not only refined his familiar techniques but also deployed several new strategies. His “brown forms” on repeated c-prints of the same image are particularly successful.  Rosch has previously employed this obscured pictorial technique, but has never before reproduced his found images.  The resulting multiplicity satisfyingly suspends meaning between the work’s constituent parts, producing an effect, which, much like memory, exists more as an afterimage than a perceivable object.   

Rosch’s painterly departures create similarly suspended meaning, though through entirely different means. In the large canvass diptych cryptically entitled Richard Vs. Richard and a Conversation with Joe about AbEx, Rosch generates an unexpected resonance. Each half of the work complements the other in a satisfyingly ceaseless formal interplay.   The painted brown forms seem to reference the sculptures and drawings of Richard Serra, but there is something about their quiet passivity that evokes the late abstractions of Richard Diebenkorn.  This pair are surely not the two Richards of the work’s title, but the piece’s ambiance, its imagined conversation, and its unified effect, implicate not only these two artists, but all known producers of canonized artwork.

Despite some ribald moments, Rosch’s works do not seek to overwhelm.  Though inquisitive, the quiet tone is more reflective than challenging.  They unfold progressively, producing satisfying and at times surprising discoveries that over time deepen rather than fade.