Ross' work, on view at James Kelly Contemporary, is pricey these days, but probably cheaper than therapy.
It would be trite to claim that Johnnie Winona Ross is some kind of modern merging of Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin and it wouldn't give much credibility to Ross' own distinct view and style of painting. But still.
Ross, like Martin, is clearly influenced by the landscape, and his alliterative and poetically titled exhibition, Deep Creek Seeps, reads like a mantra. Each repetition sinks the viewer a little farther into the series of perspectives and emotions that Ross lays out in a succession most previously notable in Rothko's work. Ross' exhibition is good, and it is worth moving from work to work to examine his very carefully constructed and labor-intensive paintings. But the show also is a rarity in the sense that it's really not necessary. Too often artists rely on the sum of an exhibition to create the sense of a greater whole, even if the individual pieces fall flat. With Deep Creek Seeps, however, the desire is to get rid of the exhibition and focus on a singular work. For me, that work is "Dark Creek" (2008).
Plenty of artists work in a minimal or reductive vein, but few manage to surpass derivations of what is established. Few manage to go beyond a proficiency as technicians. But Ross is different. As minimal and compositionally simple as his work is, it is soulful. In other words, to say that Ross evokes Rothko or Martin is really to say that he evokes the universal triggers that those artists, in their mastery, also pulled. Everybody oars it differently, but it's the same river for those few who are determined and skilled enough to find water.
In the case of Ross' "Dark Creek," there is a complexity beneath the surface that begs endless introspection and reinvention. A smaller work, only about 2 feet tall, the piece is made up of horizontal lines of white and gray/blue gradient against a voluptuous black background that shakes a cavernous blue out of its depth. Along both the top and bottom edge, the pigment is worn through enough to expose the linen beneath.
Rather than feeling overworked, or self-consciously antiqued, it reads as a simple, organic line, a natural erosion that provokes sedimentary emotion and forensic curiosity. The surface, as with all of Ross' surfaces, is a perfect finished plane, allowing for flat, light absorbing color when viewed head-on and reflecting as well as any mirror when viewed from a steep angle.
Color and surface are achieved through extraordinary craft with the use of pure pigments, carbonized bone and burnished marble. The juxtaposition of precision and freedom as two distinct and mutually enabling components of the artist's hand is a feat worthy of a small, sharp intake of breath. Very few objects of any kind are created in the world today with such care and craft.
"Dark Creek" is, at first, a lesson in fine painting. What is seen and admired is the technique, the construction, the decisions made by the artist, the simple pleasure of the basic colors and forms. Soon, it begins to evoke, with some titular provocation, a sense of striated, stony depth. The colors writhe and the eye passes through cold water, into mossy grottoes, down through bedrock and toward a warming core. The blue black maintains mass and the white begins to fuse and project heat like an imagined planet's core, like the whitest, hottest fire at the tip of a torch. It builds toward a sustained crescendo of shimmer and vibration, with Ross' seemingly simple choices having become alchemical, elemental processes. At one moment still and at the next almost breathing fire, it is a chemistry that contains both the kinetic and the calm.
Another comparison to an artist comes to mind, or at least a comparison to what that artist's work achieves and conveys: Dan Flavin. The titanium white bands that hover most spryly on the surface of "Dark Creek" are reminiscent in width and hue to the fluorescent tubing with which Flavin constructed his works in pursuit of a similar tension between radiant, powered light and still, meditative calm. Ross is beginning to negotiate some very deep waters, indeed.
New Mexico is legendary for its light, which is thought to be so friendly to painters. Typically, this is understood as a tool for classic landscape painting, but with a loose evolution from Georgia O'Keeffe, through Martin and on to Ross, it's clear that the light here allows more than juniper scrub and churches to be well painted. There is an underlying character to the makeup of things, to the secret construction of the world and the particles which course through everything, which can be glimpsed here. It must be so that if you are able to match the pace inside your own body with the stillness of the light and the land in this strange place, you will begin to hear, to see and to feel the sympathetic agitations that make planets move.
Just ask Johnnie Winona Ross.
Deep Creek Seeps, through June 14. James Kelly Contemporary, 1601 Paseo de Peralta, 505-989-1601
