Paul Mosse
11 Oct - 17 Nov 2007
PAUL MOSSE
"St Thomas' Legacy"
11 Oct - 17 Nov 2007
Paul Mosse is one of the most individualistic artists working in Ireland. His working style has no comparison in Irish Art but compares more with the laboriousness of Leonardo Drew’s casts and constructions or the fragile accretions of everything from food to dust to birdseed of Dieter Roth’s Islands, to name two distant references. All three artists work with found, at times biodegradable, everyday detritus. All three invite the viewer to suspend prejudice towards ordinary, even useless materials and to watch instead the transformation of the mean into the monumental with such expressive force as to alter one’s acceptance of where the art starts and the ordinary finishes.
A lot of questions hang over this work as over any good work of art. According to the exhibition title, doubt is a conscious stratagem of the artist. Mosse says cryptically :
"Doubt. A double-edged sword. It finds new worlds. Or voids. And plenty of odd places in between."
These works explore new territory. Ordinary rules of perspective don’t apply. Neither do the manners of abstraction suffice to reign in their anarchy. They are led in large part by the dictates of the materials and the process of making to achieve extreme and extraordinary physical statements. Mosse is an artist who is direct, highly inventive and gloriously out on a limb. There is a baroque exuberance in the means but a humble, even insecure grasp of the world in the final fragile form. These works are at war with convention and mediocrity; they are a battleground of artistic will and physical process. Catherine Marshall in her accompanying text commissioned for this exhibition points to the artist’s involvement in the natural forces that surround him :
Mosse’s solution was to parallel the creative forces of the natural world around him by replicating its complexity, through a myriad of technical innovations, using layers of fretted plywood stencils, plugged with millions of tiny folded and painted paper in-fills, that twist and grow from one layer to another, and injectionns of paint from the back of the latticed ground........The incorporation of corporate packaging alongside paint and sculpted wood in his work emphasises his scepticism of high culture while acknowledging man’s destructive as well as constructive impact on the environment.
( Living Fossils, Catherine Marshall, October, 2007 )
"St Thomas' Legacy"
11 Oct - 17 Nov 2007
Paul Mosse is one of the most individualistic artists working in Ireland. His working style has no comparison in Irish Art but compares more with the laboriousness of Leonardo Drew’s casts and constructions or the fragile accretions of everything from food to dust to birdseed of Dieter Roth’s Islands, to name two distant references. All three artists work with found, at times biodegradable, everyday detritus. All three invite the viewer to suspend prejudice towards ordinary, even useless materials and to watch instead the transformation of the mean into the monumental with such expressive force as to alter one’s acceptance of where the art starts and the ordinary finishes.
A lot of questions hang over this work as over any good work of art. According to the exhibition title, doubt is a conscious stratagem of the artist. Mosse says cryptically :
"Doubt. A double-edged sword. It finds new worlds. Or voids. And plenty of odd places in between."
These works explore new territory. Ordinary rules of perspective don’t apply. Neither do the manners of abstraction suffice to reign in their anarchy. They are led in large part by the dictates of the materials and the process of making to achieve extreme and extraordinary physical statements. Mosse is an artist who is direct, highly inventive and gloriously out on a limb. There is a baroque exuberance in the means but a humble, even insecure grasp of the world in the final fragile form. These works are at war with convention and mediocrity; they are a battleground of artistic will and physical process. Catherine Marshall in her accompanying text commissioned for this exhibition points to the artist’s involvement in the natural forces that surround him :
Mosse’s solution was to parallel the creative forces of the natural world around him by replicating its complexity, through a myriad of technical innovations, using layers of fretted plywood stencils, plugged with millions of tiny folded and painted paper in-fills, that twist and grow from one layer to another, and injectionns of paint from the back of the latticed ground........The incorporation of corporate packaging alongside paint and sculpted wood in his work emphasises his scepticism of high culture while acknowledging man’s destructive as well as constructive impact on the environment.
( Living Fossils, Catherine Marshall, October, 2007 )