Greg Rose: New Work

Greg Rose makes paintings that lie somewhere on the spectrum between landscape and abstraction. Organic shapes and architectural structures commingle in jarring color combinations, both pleasing and shocking. Textured decal-like forms sit atop flat, pristinely smooth surfaces. The Los Angeles-based artist’s graphic, stylized imagery seems like a mutant outgrowth of Disney animation or Japanese anime.

There is, indeed, a cinematic quality to the work. Out-of-context pieces of nature are presented in windows, like edited viewpoints. These frames and isolated details create a beginning and end to the overall image, a certain narrative structure. Colors fade into one another like a cliched sunset, or transitions between movie scenes.

Rose’s work draws from Eastern art forms, including Chinese scholar’s stones and Japanese ikebana. These traditions emphasize the arbitrariness of nature and the aesthetics of the organic, where eccentricity is highly prized. But in fact, many scholar’s stones were altered by their owners to heighten their aesthetic qualities, and certainly flower arranging involves human intervention. Rose explores our attempts to reconnect with nature by controlling and manipulating it. His paintings depict the order we crave amidst the appearance of naturalness: the ultimate codification of natural beauty.