Greg Rose

“Landscape” takes the form of a verb in Los Angeles artist Greg Rose’s paintings of manicured nature. Beauty that is created and cultivated, making something more ideal than it is in reality, is particularly apparent in the suburban yards and celluloid landscape of greater Los Angeles. Rose’s paintings express “natural beauty” as a human construct: the aesthetic idea of nature, rather than nature itself.

The paintings begin with traditional Asian art forms of garden design, Ikebana, and scholar’s stones. They incorporate images of landscaped Southern California, where anything grows, perhaps flourishing to the point of mutation. Influenced by cinema and in particular anime, Rose employs a hyper-real palette, a flattened perspective, and the artificial, constructed compositions of set design.

Representation is reduced to a graphic yet recognizable form. Three-dimensional paint application, in the manner of icing on a petit-four, contrasts with the surrounding, smoothed picture planes — a reminder of the artifice of both the garden and representation.