Impressions and Strokes
Works by Rainer Gross- exhibited at the gallery of Holy Trinity Church Greenport
Curator
Franklin Hill Perrell
Essay: On and Off the Grid
In this body of works, never before exhibited, stylistic features present throughout Gross’s production are accentuated in a unique combination. The Twins Transformed, as this writer might title these canvases, rely on a strategy of intervention, whereby new configurations are subsequently painted onto pre-existing works from the artist’s iconic 1990’s series of Twins.
In the initial iteration of the Twins (as the word implies, canvases produced in pairs,) it was evident that Gross’s pre-occupation was how textures react to each other or interact. In the current works, new elements have been added intuitively, with pigment-laden strokes spontaneously applied over time, as the artist explained, “whenever I held a brush and thought of a place to go.”
The fresh expansive new forms are done heavily, in gestural, painterly brushwork, using saturated pigments, impasto, in an array of striking hues, sumptuous and sophisticated colors, deployed over the pre-existing painting. The foundational texture, of smaller, more regularized elements, usually in muted earth tones, or other subtle tints, comprises a unified ground whereupon the aforementioned larger elements are enacted.
With a different register of scale, angle, placement, and with nuanced contrasts of color, the effect is contrapuntal. Music is an ongoing reference, and titles reflect musical compositions the artist has created contemporaneously. The new brushstrokes, which boldly enliven surfaces already painted, are for Gross, “like a lead-singer standing out from orchestration by back-up musicians”.
The notion of off-the grid, with its implications of non-conformity and resistance to prescribed pattern, versus on the grid as representing studied composure and logical order, is one way of entering into the complex visual dialogue that these paintings propose. Foundational to western art, the grid sustained a determinative role in classicism’s mode of prescribed order, the renaissance innovation of perspective, and an underlying matrix for cubist space, a phenomenon diversely impacting constructivism into abstract expressionism through post-modernism.
If informally, and at least subliminally, the grid is always present in the works of Rainer Gross. Forms, even when loosely organized, maintain harmonious equipoise, with all-over patterns extending throughout the compositional field. In many of Gross’s works, formal elements mutate in various ways as echoes, ghosts, off-register repeats, inversions and flips, or bold reiterations, at times jauntily askew, whether carefully plotted, or evidencing alla prima spontaneity. These aspects are subtly present in the Transformed Twins, and are especially pronounced in the contemporaneous and related series of madras themed paintings, the artist’s current preoccupation.
In an encyclopedic manner, Gross’s career has traversed appropriation, painterly pop, photo-realism, trompe l’oeil illusion, system, process, and pattern painting, withal sustaining his individual vision. Perhaps a defining element throughout is his willingness to intervene with the pre-existing, spanning the history of art, in innovative ways. The twins, or contact painting as herein described, and its progeny going forward, comprises the artist’s singularly prime stylistic innovation.
Franklin Hill Perrell
Southold, NY.
August 2025
Note: Artist quotes are from interviews with Rainer Gross at his Cutchogue studio, August 2025.