Andrew Ross: Bucket of Truth

There’s a strange no-man’s land between the intentionally surreal and murky reality of digitally created forms that through a combination of form, text and effect mimic surrealism without actually accessing surrealism’s conceptual motivations. Ross in his many capacities as an artist—sculptor, videographer, and performer—has frequently mined the web and dark web for all manner of memes, images, phrases, and tropes to construct a topsy-turvy world of hybrid monsters with deep sociological underpinnings. In Bucket of Truth, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Kai Matsumiya, he flattens his volumetric proclivities onto canvas, but in so doing, reveals a reality that is more persuasive in vibrant color than it might be in laser cut foam. But Bucket of Truth, as the name indicates, is playing with painting’s, at times, indiscriminate ability to deceive. Watermelon of Truth (all works 2023) juxtaposes the painterly with the practical by inscribing and deconstructing a fruit. Ross renders the watermelon with a set-painter’s ability to make something look real without the excessive effort of a photorealistic painter’s meticulous and obsessive detail. He convincingly depicts the mottled green and white skin while etching the word “Truth” into the rind.

Ross’s paintings such as Bucket of Truth, Flux, and A Rosenberg are simultaneously collages, and Ross has built up the surface with layers of canvas and paper, and cut away forms and borders generating a sense of accumulation as well as a degree of conscious alteration taking place in each piece. Within that context, the Truth Watermelon begins to disintegrate as neatly cut rectangular facets of the skin; the paper substrate supporting the paint begins to lift off and disperse into the neutral gray ground. Unlike the painted incisions, these reveal a visually disruptive ochre beneath the green, one which exposes a metaphorical gold lining. Thus the almost-real and the surreal begin to butt heads.

Ross’s painterly sleight-of-hand playing with seamlessly collaged images brings James Rosenquist or Richard Patterson to mind, painters who can convince the viewer that impossible bedfellows can exist briefly on the canvas, while avoiding Magritte’s tendency to entertain the absurd. In A Rosenberg, a set of pink fingers holds a sepia photo of the artist’s grandfather, except that the fingers and the photo are subtly differentiated by being on separate pieces of material, then laminated onto the canvas (something that can’t really be discerned in reproductions). The friction ridges of the fingertips are highlighted, again, in fuchsias and lilacs set against bright pinks. Although we are initially lulled into assuming we are simply looking at a hand holding a photograph—indicated by the basic parameters of fingerprints, joints and apparent folds in the skin—on a second look, the painting begins to separate into its basic components: pictures of pictures.

The painting A Rosenberg further births two more works, both Untitled. These smaller pieces employ the material that comprises the negative space around the fingers. In the untitled work where the fingertips are vertically oriented, the forms act as windows onto a black background with bursts of liquid rainbow color. Deprived of the realistically rendered finger subject of the painting, the negative spaces can be anything the artist or viewer imagines—hills, windows, even the droopy elliptical hooded heads of Guston’s Klansmen. Ross playfully games the whole notion of cognition by forcing the viewer to acknowledge the very thin line between knowing exactly what we are seeing, and being utterly clueless and open to interpretation, or jumping to conclusions.

Most of the paintings in Bucket of Truth seem content to give the viewer something to hold onto, whether it be a watermelon, a family photo, or a glistening organ, as in Lamb’s Heart. In Flux, the artist takes an opposing tack—offering the slimmest shred of recognizability and letting the idea of an image melt into complete abstraction. A photorealistically painted On/Off switch and its two attendant screw-heads sit on the upper left quadrant of the canvas. It is just so convincing that we grasp for meaning in the floating rectangles of cardboard brown and the colorful graffiti-esque squiggles, which are not visually contiguous with the switch yet are clearly part of the same painted image. But it refuses to coalesce. Pigs Plaid Cloth is a sweet coda to Bucket of Truth in that it pushes the literal side of Ross’s painting to its extreme, doing the exact opposite of Flux. In Pigs Plaid Cloth, the viewer is fairly certain of what they are looking at, regardless of whether it is a pure invention of the computer or involves some creative photography. A fuzzy pig is the subject of a demented fabric design, which the artist has bunched up and presented to us as a finished work—a caricature of a pig, distorted, and then faithfully reproduced—yet another picture of a picture of a picture.