David Ross

David Ross was a painter. A painter who couldn’t “bother” - as he once described his views to me on painting and by extension on art as a whole. His existential gaze was rich. His paintings were existentially conceived. His critique of painting as a practice was lucid, substantial and far reaching. His allegiance to modernism passionate and paradoxically detached at the same time. 

Working in London almost the whole of his life, that is when London was the triumphant centre of the world, endowed him with a perspective parallel to that of Emmanuel Kant - in the sense that he almost never left London, his hub, in spite of frequent journeys in Europe and long stays in France, Ischia and Amsterdam. Mainly because he didn’t feel he needed to embrace a “travel routine” in order to acquire or widen the ability to form a view, a theory, a sense of what matters essentially in the evaluation of reality and its projections onto the sphere of theory, art, life.

Feeling the pulse of the actual world which we think we are part of and its changes  and transmutations. And failures.

He painted a series called The Most Beautiful West, wholly inspired by the  Hollywood movie narrative, which exported to the whole world the idea about heroic America that became most dear to Americans and non-Americans alike. Again he didn’t need to travel to America to feel  the essence of this subject. Nevertheless his work seeks to depict the fragile, the existentially insecure, perhaps ambiguous, cowboys’ lives and their environment. In spite of their beliefs in the righteousness of a received promise. The undeniable beauty. The underground melancholy.

An earlier series “ Not to be you” feels like a projection of Self. Not like in ‘myself’, or ‘yourself’. But ‘Self’. ‘The’ Self as a phenomenal object/subject that came into existence without knowing why or what for. Except just being. The full capacity of just being. Nothing else and no one else.

Being a painter who couldn’t “bother” made it easy for him to expand into conceptual sculpture installations, which conveyed a cool sense of the poetical, or the a-poetical, almost by default.

We present here some works from The Most Beautiful West series. 

As a homage to David Ross as a painter, a theorist and a man with a free mind,  unobstructed by cultural delusions and attitudes.