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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | January 2005 
The Singular Double Visionary Art of Christopher Moses
 The paintings of Christopher Moses embody a longstanding and ongoing investigation into the relationship between the visual and the actual - between that which the eyes see and that which constitutes reality.
 Although he professes to approach his art spontaneously and intuitively, without a preconceived plan as to what he wants a new painting to look like, many if not all of the images he has created in recent years manifest or allude to this fundamental questioning of the visual/actual relationship noted above - a good indication of the extent to which this fundamental and ultimately philosophical question has permeated his psyche.
Moses' houses are typically anthropomorphic - each suggestive, in frontal view, of a face with two eyelike windows and an arched-front-door mouth, and he often employs rubbery distortions that lend them animated qualities. (Growing up in Los Angeles, he was convenient to Disneyland, which he first visited as a child during the week it opened to the public in 1955 - an experience that no doubt made the cartoon universe of Walt Disney et al all the more palpable to Moses at the time.)
Several years ago, Moses began what became an ongoing series of paintings in which his houses occupy landscapes that he creates by intermingling pastel dust with gesso and, in his word, "swirling" the result is a colored gesso over his painting surface. He says that the particular personalities or moods that seem to be reflected on these house-faces are entirely determined by chance - by the kinds of distortions he has to make in a house in order to fit it into its abstract-expression is landscape.
 In a related series of compositions, Moses' swooping and swirling fields of gesso become cloudscapes or other organic-looking, three-dimensional structures occupied by varying numbers of eerie, disembodied eyes that all appear to be staring back at you. The disembodied eye is of course an archetypal symbol common to many cultures, often employed as an emblem of divine omniscience.
In the latter images he demonstrates that he can quite adeptly represent nature or "reality" as it's commonly experienced through our visual organs, but the landscapes he seems to be most interested in exploring through his art are the endlessly mysterious terrains that lie behind the eyes and beyond the body.
Moses, a Los Angeles native, lives and paints in the small fishing village of Yelapa on the west coast of Mexico. In 2003, his work was featured in the year-long exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland entitled "High on Life: Transcending Addiction," and more recently Chris presented "Voice of the Path: Psychological Landscapes" at the BGH Gallery in Santa Monica California.
Chris and his wife, artist Anton Haardt, divide their time between their home in the Garden District of New Orleans and their tropical retreat in Yelapa Mexico, off the coast of Puerto Vallarta. For more information about the artist and his paintingss visit his online art gallery at ChristopherMoses.com
-Tom Patterson |
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