David Rosen handles transparent oil glazes almost as though they were washes and restricts palette to blacks, greys, umbers, ochres and much white space. This gives his work a certain graphic quality, heightened by a shallow picture plane; the figures tend to fill and even overflow the canvas top to bottom and edge to edge. The glaze wash is beautifully controlled. Perhaps the content is too specific, however, too topical, to have the kind of universality one would like to see his work achieve.

—Joan Hugo