ART ISSUES, March / April, 2000~David Humphrey

NEW YORK E-MAIL

Thomas Trosch’s paintings of aristocratic ladies with their art collections are similarly paradoxical, simultaniously pretty and rugged. He blends allusions to other artists; most notably, Florine Stettheimer, the queen of deceptive frivolity, and Philip Guston, the muck-master of comic threat. Trosch sustains and develops reductive stylization with a fierce commitment to the full-bodied application of thick paint. His conspicuous handmade labor related incongruously to the genteel leisure exercised by the people on his pictures. These ladies of breeding may know a meringue from a Madeleine and how to put together a mean decorating scheme, but hey would be disconcerted by the clean-up and messy labor required to make these paintings. Trosch’s confectionery touch is boldly muscular and purveys large amounts of paint to extreme excess. The surfaces swell for raw canvas into mountainous peaks and vicious glacial slabs. These disjunctions, however, don’t amount to a critique of the depicted lifestyles so much as they suggest a deep longing and ambivalence

Like Guston, Trosch favors the squarish blob as the basic unit of pictorial organization. It is a container that holds large quantities of paint and the potential of becoming other things like furniture, clothing, eyeballs, or dogs. The blob’s blunt versatility alternately builds analogies or collapses under its own weight into dumb matter. Trosch disperses his forms across the canvas in a subjectively coherent patchwork. Dresses and other patterned apparel skew a generally frontal organization with irregular shapes and shifts of scale, which gives the work its sense of life.

Trosch’s paintings anticipate a place among fine things in upscale homes, despite the fact that the lady collectors in his pictures don’t own anything that looks like Trosch. Trosch’s people have huge unblinking eyes, as if to express their very large appetites for seeing. They are idealized viewers whose whole life consists of doing what most of us can only dream about; spectator, delegator, collector, collector, and confectioner become interchangeable options for you identification. The stylized eccentricity and period overtones of these paintings cast them in the mode of storybook Arcadias, where everything always has been and always will be comfortable.