AMONG THE ECHOES

Todd Ros is engaged in making paintings that are rigorously formal constructs from which all extraneous elements and representational reference have seemingly been excised. Composed of vertical bands of varying widths of flat color, the paintings evince an unusual palette outside the predictable precincts of post-minimalist painting. Ros's color choices are the first clue that there is more in these paintings than meets the eye. The palette for each work in this series is based on and determined by the colors used on a specific World War II aircraft. The amount of any one color and its position in the sequence of stripes on the canvas is determined by the order of appearance of these colors from nose to tail on the original airplane. The aircraft's identification number appears as a parenthetical phrase in the title of each work. The cognoscenti immediately understand the reflected source of the abstraction, while the majority of viewers and many art insiders remain outside that privileged circle. Today, relatively few remain who might know first hand the source of these austerely beautiful works. The artist has quietly empowered them - a class often disenfranchised by contemporary art.

Bruce Guenther
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Portland Art Museum
Excerpt from Among the Echoes, Oregon Biennial 2001 Catalog


PLANE GEOMETRY

There are artists who approach their work as if they were explicating science experiments: intellectualized, hyper-articulate and as grounded as concrete in the English language.

Then there are artists like Todd Ros, who, despite the deeply formal aspects of their work, free-associate like performance artists.

To get a better idea of that dichotomy, take a look at Ros' accomplished abstract geometric paintings at Augen Gallery this month. With their regimented, vertical bands of bold color, viewers might think they're visiting the studio of Dr. Meticulous.

But Ros, who was chosen for the 2001 Oregon Biennial, is one of the most casual-speaking artists working in the local scene -- which makes these paintings, and Ros' gradual development in the past several years, all the more impressive.

Not too long ago, Ros was painting abstractions that were, by his own admission, a bit too gestural. Then, in the late '90s, the 41-year-old artist made a huge leap, stripping away any hint of representation for what amounted to a fascinating blend of both minimalist and color-field painting.

Those formulated vertical bands and expanses of color have become more regimented with the latest show. And for good reason. Although Ros might have functioned instinctively in the past, for this show he finally found a hat rack on which to hang his hat.

An interest in World War II airplanes and fighter pilots led to an epiphany while he was painting some vertically striped paintings: The striped colors on some aircraft weren't too different from what he was painting.

So, working from photographs found in various airplane books, Ros began to reproduce the colors found on particular aircraft from both the European and Pacific theaters (including airplanes from both Allied and Axis powers).

The resulting paintings look nearly identical -- they are all composed of vertical stripes -- varying only in the colors and the number and width of stripes. The famed Japanese Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero, for example, is thus represented by a series of black, white and red bands, the white and black framing a thicker band of white expanse.

The painting based on the colors of the successful American fighter plane from the Pacific Theater, the F4U Corsair, is represented by thin white bands framing a thin red band, then followed by a large navy field that takes up two-thirds of the picture. The equally famed British-made Hawker Hurricane is one of the most colorful in the series -- a masculine collection of red, gold, white, brown, blue and yellow bands that tell us the men who flew these planes were bold, courageous and decisive.

On a superficial level, the paintings seem heavily indebted to Barnett Newman's "zip" paintings, where saturated fields of color were separated by a vertical "zip" line. But while Newman's paintings were radical polemics for their time -- according to many interpreters, the "zip" paintings represented the inner and outer selves seeking unity -- Ros' paintings are far simpler animals of pure expression.

Indeed, Ros admits to being unfamiliar with Newman. What he does share, however, is a specialized refinement -- a belief in expressing as much as possible through absolute reduction. In this pluralistic era where the cool seduction is increasingly rare, that's not a bad legacy to share.

D. K. Row, The Oregonian, March 22, 2002, A&E, pg. 60 & 62