When we tell stories often we return to fragments that we can remember; the sections of spaces within our minds of places, colors, and textures. This fragmented history is what drives the formal decisions in the work of Warren Rosser. Similar to the process of disk defragmentation -- pulling apart information and rearranging it in new structures, the artist directs the viewer's eye to find paths within fields of color. At the heart of Rosser’s practice are the different ways of processing his relationship to paint and images themselves.
Rosser’s pieces in the Kansas City Collection are derived from two separate bodies of work that function as signals to a sense of place. Default No. 2 is a departure from Rosser’s usual process of call and response with paint. He creates the surface detail utilizing a technique of layering oil paint with a squeegee to create mechanical rows. The work developed after a number of experiments Rosser made with printmaking and paintings made from fabric. The compositions are banded slightly off-center reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s minimal use of single vertical strips. In Default No. 2 the composition resembles the function of a scanner. Further, these “scan lines” of paint reveal an undercoat of thin layers of drawing that occur in many of the paintings. These light linear brushstrokes recall Rosser’s own memory of architectural maps he collected in his native Wales.
The other works, True Blue, Seeing Between, and Thin Ice are more connected to Rosser’s love for the concept of place. Kansas City’s geography forms a bowl with Downtown and Crown Center opposite each other at the high points, intersected by the Crossroads Arts District at the lowest point. This space between is what Rosser is exploring, less interested in directly referencing the landscape itself and instead how culture manipulates space through roads, architecture, and other means of divergence. With Rosser’s compositions it is hard to find a single perspective point or direct reference to a specific place, as those things are purposefully lost in abstraction.
The topography of Rosser’s paintings shift as they move from studio floor to final hung canvas. His different painting processes create zones within the image, split by bold angular lines or color field contrasts that are miniature painting moments. New abstracted forms come into play in some of these small breakages. Within them the viewer can float through different opacities like the frames of a graphic novel.
Color comes first in Rosser’s work. It is through color that gaps in memory or visual data harmonize and become the places in which abstract non-linear stories can coalesce. Thin Ice resembles a crumpled hockey arena, surrounded by jagged angles chopped up like a David Hockney photocollage. As a metaphor, “thin ice” is a strong one for this work with turbulence and darkness at its center masked by a thin white veil of ivory and titanium white. It is in these moments that the fragmented parts by which the paintings began become the spaces for which the viewer can explore contemplative moments of their own personal history.
– Melaney Mitchell