Greg Rose

From a purely aesthetic point of view, many of Greg Rose’s most recent paintings are irresistible. In works like Triple Arrangement (Arr 3), 2006, he employs a medley of shrill colors in ink and gouache, dexterously resolving these elements into images far more unified and compelling than a description of the composition would suggest. According to the artist, Ikebana flower arrangements provide the basic subject matter for this series, but Rose supercedes mimesis, using the formal properties native to painting to interpret the elegant conventions of Japanese floral design. This approach is most obvious in his determinedly two-dimensional treatment of space, in the hard, graphic edges that define passages of watery ink, and in the subtle but significant geometric intrusions of gouache—perhaps evocative of vases—that encroach on the otherwise whimsical floral forms. In the paintings that most obviously depict exotic flowers arranged in a vase, it might even be said that Rose toys with paint’s capacity to both describe and embellish the observed world, and in doing so proposes abstraction as a representational mode.

Ultimately, though, these paintings seem to have less to do with exploring the critical possibilities of the decorative tradition in painting, than with harnessing those conventions to make attractive pictures of flowers. Art historians often claim the work of Dutch eighteenth-century flower painters like Jan van Huysen as complex ciphers of their social milieu. One might usefully ask, while relishing the works themselves, what need Rose’s precious, ornate brand of still life painting fulfills in contemporary life?