John L Moore

Born 1939, Cleveland, Ohio. Resides in New York since 1985.New York artist John L. Moore continues to elaborate on his theme of mirrors and water in his recent paintings. Like Herrera, he is interested in modernism and popular culture although his work is less mediated and refined. There is an aspect of roughed-up Pop in his style, his sketchy, schematized imagery forcefully blunt, his painting technique spontaneous and expressive. Scaled to his height - Moore's signature format is 80 x 67" - his canvases contain enigmatic ovoid shapes he calls mirrors, floating on the surface as if on water. However, they are blank, reflecting whatever the viewer might bring to them. These mirrors can also be read as eyes or openings into the painting, holes in the fabric of illusion, personal and impersonal witnesses, implicating perception and events: how we see, what we see, if we see. His palette, always restricted to a few colors, blooms brilliantly red in this selection. His fields waver like fire or water, like the bloodied seas of the middle passage. They also have the look of curtains that divide the fictive from the real. Of his abstractions, Moore says, read them anyway you want.-Lilly Wei, Art Critic.