CRIME PAYS: 999 WAYS

Sebastian Rosen is drawn to the expressive power of color and texture that only an intuitive process-based method of painting can cultivate. His canvases construct, expand, and collapse space by confronting the rigidity of perspective and denying a clear viewpoint into the worlds he creates. He offers worlds whose geometry and logic are amorphous and shifting; thus never stable. It is through the absence of such pictorial stability that the viewer is forced to intuit their own way through these spaces. This gives the viewer something in common with the figures inhabiting these spaces, both unsure how and where to move.

In his show, Crime Pays: 999 Ways, Rosen presents a collection of these spaces. The works range from sweeping landscapes to intimate rooms that pull the viewer back and forth from the exterior to the interior and give evidence of this material journey. With each part of the painting composed through a reactive and intuitive process, it is the materials used that drive these decisions. It is where the surface of these materials meet the images they create that his works become windows that question whether one should look through them or at them.