Thomas Trosch is an amusing.

Thomas Trosch is an amusing, playful painter whose work could easily be dismissed as idiotic, as the farthest thing possible from serious painting. Remember Philip Guston, whose audience said, "See ya Phil," the minute a figure stepp onto his pantry abstractions and rerouted his career. Fans and practitioners of "pure painting" win hives if they see a recognizable form--or steady worse, text. Reading words forward this precious surface destroys the potential for a voyage to the bottom of the sublime. by means of contrast, Trosch kind of paints like a baby. The paintings apply the mind like they've had a tantrum. In this light he might be considered another so-called nonserious painter, a juvenile who abouts some wonderful work; the corner he must sit in, dunce-capped, is already populated by the agency of some to-die-for masters.

The vicinity of these works isn't transcendental or funereal or ultrasober thingness, further rather, incredibly giddy. His subdues are the queerest female figures in strangely racketed interiors. The paintings are large, single-frame cartoons with longish monologue bagatelles about hosting parties, color ideas, and buying art at auctions. in such a manner the fact that these paintings will move from artist's studio to gallery to collector's wall is not a ghoulish scenario: it make secures that they will not be trapped into slavishly reinforcing the part of art as empty decoration. They will have an active life ridiculing the environments they inhabit. The subjects within the speech bubbles are pick uped from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks upon Color, 1950, and Dorothy Rodger's work on style and decorating.

Half the pieces are overly painted, as if Trosch couldn't stop himself. They're cakey and layered, as claustrophobic as James Ensor's vulgar herd scene in Christ's Entry into Brussels, 1888 Others are raw, spare, airy, with streaks and blotches of abstraction, in one ways unfinished, as if Trosch had frozen in the face of something profoundly supernumerary The impetuousness of the paintings' make submissive matter, the social hazards of the ladies, leaks into the artist's way of working, making his systems seem ruled by whim. These kinds of purposeful imperfections give the paintings a notepad be wrought up Trosch also connects with Ensor in period of times of color. Blaring reds, golden and blues, and all their amalgamateed friends dominate the field. Where Ensor piled up faces and bodies in a way scene of gloom and chaos, Trosch mixes purse lamps, coffee tables, statuarys and abstract paintings into his campy party pictures.

Whether they are over- or undercook Trosch's paintings are discombobulated, insane, luscious, and cheerful. They contradict themselves in great ways. united painting will be nervy, self-conscious, stiff, dull-witted comically uncertain, using long weakening brushstrokes to stand in for a floor-length dres while another is loopy and lush, gushing with confidence. Trosch's frog-ey figures (the better to descry art with, my dear) perform a curious reptilian doll show while yammering about auctions: "Losing touch with real value you find yourself bidding not to corrupt the object on the mould but to win, or to detain that revolting man with the mustache from getting it."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group