It is an unmistakable truth that Christian Rosa is entering the top ranks of a new generation of abstract painters. TBT, 2013 is a pristine example of Rosa’s vibrant approach to abstraction, spare in gesture but bursting with movement and figure. At the far left of Rosa’s blank canvas, which presents us with a meditative background upon which his figures dance freely, an enormous blue coil sits below a simple stroke of black spray paint. To the right, various lines and exaggerated dots of paint, pencil, and oil stick come to resemble a kind of playground, where the gestural fragments of Rosa’s imagination interact. Restricting his palette to blue, red, white, and black, his work in primary colors grounds the piece.
Rosa’s lack of brushwork makes for a somewhat anonymous approach with regards to the artist’s hand, much in the same way that Joan Miro’s shapes and figurines superseded his technical application. Indeed, Rosa’s work possesses the improvisational spirit of a truly fearless painter, one who scorns the possibility of ever duplicating his own work. Born in Brazil and raised in Vienna, Rosa’s painterly methodology draws greatly from a combination of cultures: the dangerous rhythm of the streets of his home country, embodied by the graffiti-associated tool kit, and the twentieth century European approach to abstract painting. His own influences include Cy Twombly, whose influence we can clearly see in his spiralling structures, as well as in his efforts to create two separate planes in his picture: one as the blank background, and the other on which his shapes are free to come alive.
