Stephen Westfall
Sex on the Beach
Two flat, vertically striped ovoids against a grey horizon and a grenadine sky. They are a linked pair, almost exactly the same size, sharing a bridge between them. It's a horizontal band, almost an umbilical cord, or the last stretch of shared matter before two cells separate. They're not humanoid bodies, though ovoids could always be heads. Look at one of Guston's bean heads, a bean with an eye. Moser's forms are as basic and as compromised by the stuff of paint and the imagination's perverse equivocality when drawing intervenes. I'm reminded of Guston's paintings just before they coalesced into lumpen, but identifiable figuration. There were these contractions of the field into darker testes, heads, almost-heads. The generative nature of these forms was proven out. Sexiness is everywhere in Moser's painting, in the ooze and spring, in the close heat of the air, in the conjoining and stretch of separation. The backdrop of horizon and sky echoes Picasso's beach paintings from 1931-32. His Figures at the Seaside (1931) are sexing it up on a dune rise above a cabana before the beach, sea and sky. The glare surrounds them. We could all use a cold drink. I'm sober, but I nominate a Sex on the Beach, a sort of Vodka Sunrise, only with cranberry juice substituting for grenadine and the addition of peach schnapps. Bottoms up!