George Lawson Gallery

Following upon his successful solo here a year ago, British painter Clem Crosby will be exhibiting a group of works recently completed in his London studio, comparatively small in scale though large in scope. Crosby paints in oil on formica laminate panels. He uses this slick industrial surface to keep his paint pliant and malleable through an iterative process of search and destruction—and resurrection, eventually coaxing a broiling resolution out of the medium of paint itself, out from beneath the surface. His emergent image does not seem painted with paint so much as from paint. Crosby had early ties to the school of radical monochrome painting, and has since pushed beyond its constraints to reintroduce gesture and drama into an art grounded in material fact, while airborne in the color of light. He has taken an ambitious position, painting in a manner that embraces several generations of modernism, recasting the accomplishments of contemporary practice in the process.