Jill Moser’s paintings are deceptively lucid and satisfyingly complex. She lays down lines of a single color on a pure white ground and realizes compositions both taut and at ease. The lines are swift yet stilled, fixed and embedded in the residue of a process of erasure and adjustment. Incremental marks and events of the hand establish an environment in which the usual relationship of figure to ground becomes indeterminate. The deep space carved by Moser’s looping, repeating, rhythmic line punctures the ground and establishes a velvety void at the areas where lines converge and give over their identity as line to form.

The paintings establish a depth of field that Moser has explored in paintings, drawings, photographs, monotypes and etchings. Her exploration of the potential of each medium has generated challenges for her in the others and her exhibitions in New York and elsewhere have demonstrated the range and momentum of her development. Moser described in a recent interview:

All of my work comes out of drawing and concerns itself with the possibilities associated with drawing. I worked exclusively in that medium for many years, using all kinds of marking materials on translucent mylar. Through that work I developed an understanding of mark making and line that I have brought to all of my subsequent work. In painting I wanted to find a way of keeping the immediacy of line alive, to retain what Guston called “the bareness of drawing, how it locates, suggests and discovers.” The physicality of painting, working on a stretched canvas with the materiality of paint is altogether different from marking with chalk or oil stick on a sheet of mylar or paper. It insists on a slower, more deliberate attention to making. This sets up the field between drawing and painting that I have been investigating ever since. What remains important in both is that the image is active in the process of describing itself.

This is Jill Moser’s first exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg. During the last decade her work has been exhibited in London, Atlanta, Boston, Phoenix and early this year in Houston; this is her first solo show of paintings in New York since 1998. Her paintings and works on paper are included in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fogg, the Weatherspoon, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.