JAMES ROSEN
Excerpts from
IRMA JAFFE essay

James Rosen is one of the finest artists working in America today. The prevailing sensibility of our modern world has been compounded of cynicism, anger and despair, and the majority of our well-known artists have reflected this tragedy, these forces of disintegration in their work: some have abandoned the traditional media, using whatever is dirty and repulsive including human and animal feces, insisting that art can endow anything, even shit, with value; for there is something in the art spirit that informs the artist and transforms the simple animate world into the complex world of civilization. That is the spirit that transcends period sensibilities, that yearns for wholeness, that is the spirit that harbours the conviction that light rules over dark and that form rules over chaos.

James Rosen's art spirit is on that highroad of civilization. It beckons to hope, it rejects despair and it reaches the viewer's sense of human aspiration, not resignation. When one looks at one of his paintings or drawings, one must attend actively to the touch of his line, the subtlety of his color, as line and color impose form on the flat surface of canvas or paper that is his universe and the viewer's, as he or she enters it. His art spirit makes the invisible visible, endowing it with shapes and colors that echo infinitely in the space and time of the imagination, like whispering waves that have left, far distant, a quiet shore that yet remains, undiminished.

Plotinus: "Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other, and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of color, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye." but following his own argument he concludes "... since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?" Rosen's art has beauty and is beautiful.

Along with light, time occupies a significant place in Rosen's art. We can almost say that somehow, ambiguously, he lives in the past and present. One cannot doubt that Piero Della Francesca is as alive in him as Morandi or de Kooning.

Rosen says in a dedication in one of his catalogues, "To all who living or dead are present in my painting, I sing praises, tender affection and offer, where needed, apology."

James Rosen, artist, is an event; an event that celebrates the art spirit whether it is manifested in the sacred or the profane. He, is a source of light in his own time and time yet to be.