Alexander Ross's 2008 exhibitions at Marianne Boesky and David Nolan galleries reviewed

Alexander Ross's 2008 exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery and David Nolan Gallery showcased his distinctive artistic approach. His paintings and drawings feature ambiguous organic-synthetic forms that appear both microscopic and planetary in scale. Ross constructs models from Plastecine, photographs them, then paints from the photographs, creating works that hover between abstraction and representation. The artist's palette employs unnatural greens and other colors that suggest science-fiction vegetation. All works remain untitled, reinforcing their anonymous, alien quality. A 2007 series at David Nolan Gallery features compositions with diagonally amputated corners, as noted by Carroll Dunham in the exhibition catalog. Specific works include "Boesky 1729" (2007), an 8-foot-high canvas with meticulously rendered skin textures, and "B2273" (2008), which presents a corner of a larger constellation with a jolting scarlet negative space. Ross's method synthesizes Surrealist tendencies, combining the tight depiction of artists like René Magritte and Salvador Dalí with the automatism of Joan Miró and Max Ernst. His paint handling creates impasto contours resembling weather maps, producing visceral surface effects. The exhibitions demonstrated Ross's consistent aesthetic since his emergence in the late 1990s, with work that collapses dualities between high and low art forms. The review originally appeared in the New York Sun on March 27, 2008.