March 5, 2005, Long Beach (California) Grunion Gazette, Eye On Art

      Exhibit At Viento Y Agua Provides Feast For Eyes

      By James Scarborough

      Gazette Art Writer

Think fast — what comes to mind when you think lovely abstract designs, a Moorish aesthetic, rich color schemes?

            Alhambra, right? And I don’t mean the one nestled against the California mountains.

      What also will come to mind, or at least should, is Michael Maas’ titillating exhibition, “Summer/Winter/Madonna/Alhambra” at the Viento Y Agua Gallery.

      These saucy acrylics on wood panels serve up an extraordinary visual feast. There’s a lot going on here visually, so don’t plan to whisk through the show.

The work fooled me to an extraordinary degree, not in terms of trompe l’oeil, but in terms of mistaking one medium for another. Each image’s potency resides in optical illusion, at least when you get to know the work a little better.

      Each image unsettles the viewer with a purposeful confusion of positive and negative space. The viewer doesn’t know what’s in the front or back of the picture plane and what’s in positive and negative space. The work resembles a poetic psychologist’s Rorschach test. When I first saw the exhibition postcard, I thought the work was ceramic tile, a huge ceramic tile. With the word “Alhambra” in the title, I figured the decoration would be the sort of thing that would adorn a marketplace in Tunis.

      That was the impression, too, when I looked in the window of the gallery.  The work looked like it was ceramic: glossy, rounded, a little textured. Each piece repeated the same pattern of abstract images and each appeared as if it was being viewed underwater. The larger patterns looked like diamonds standing on their point, their edges fuzzy and vibrating.

      Situated in the centers of each of these diamonds are shapes that look like chess pawns folded over themselves, or else lollipop Pac Men. These shapes in turn pulsated and quivered. They reminded me of panning for fool’s gold and ersatz gems at Knott’s Berry Farm when I was a kid. As I approached the large piece in the entryway, the mesmerizing rhapsody in purple entitled Alhambra Series #56, the most amazing thing happened. I felt like I was being vacuumed into the piece. Talk about a work’s hold on a viewer. A center channel, undrawn but right where one would crease the  piece on its horizontal axis, which appears to be a trough or a sluice, drew me right up to the piece.

      Only then, to my utter amazement, did I realize that the work was a painting and all those visual effects were the result of modeling. That’s  when I understood that the artist had done something just short of  miraculous: he activated the picture plane in ways uncommon and energetic  and he had so effectively created the illusion of space that these things  even now, in my memory of the show, the work reminds me of tiles in a  Moorish courtyard.

      The exhibition runs until March 26. Gallery hours are 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday.

      The gallery is located at 4007 E. Fourth St. For more information, call  434-1182.

Essay By Suvan Geer

November 21, 2002

 The biomorphic geo-abstractions of painter Michael Maas strike a distinct note of friendly familiarity and an odd sense of disorientation. The forms he paints are simple - rounded interlocking shapes that seem to flow or latch into each other with a determined will. Repeatedly. Indeed, we are not sure when looking at them if it is the repetition of the male/female pairing that makes them appear so familiar or if we really have seen that coupling elsewhere. Perhaps in nature; in nestling rolling hills or a water smoothed tide line between rocks, perhaps in the calligraphic mazes of Islamic art, or maybe in less lofty places like lava lamps, cartoons or poured syrup. Visual associations tumble around behind our eyes as we trace the shapes over and over, all the while the seemingly unending abstract pattern nudges at us to remember yet resists settling down into anything specific.

As a self-taught artist Maas pursues his paintings with a controlled obsession paying open visual homage to the influences of M.C. Escher and Jackson Pollock. His “Alhambra Series” is a tribute to Escher and the inspiration that artist found in the interlocking geometric Moorish designs that decorate the walls of the great Alhambra Palace in Grenada, Spain. Escher transformed the inspiration of the tile work at the palace into a visual exploration of what are essentially mathematical structures called “tessellations”, repeating geometric patterns that seem to go on forever. Maas’ painted units of undulating, identical jigsaw fragments similarly seem to go on and on, from one canvas to another to another. In that way their unity and multiplication suggests a kind of computerized update of the ancient Moor’s Islamic concepts of cosmic order. Though this is a more modern, circuit board kind of logic it too is wedded to the inherent spiritual and psychological release of a repeated visual mantra. What the artist calls “getting lost” in the image.

The seeming liquidity of the all over forms Maas paints also suggest Jackson Pollock’s more free wheeling drip paintings that had neither a beginning or an end. But in place of the gestural freedom Pollack used to visually imply that the power of the image could not be contained by the painting’s surface, Maas uses pattern and repetition of the individual units from image to image to suggest that what we are looking at is only a fraction of the larger whole. Just as Pollock’s largest canvases presented painting as an all encompassing environment for the spectator and so undid the Renaissance idea of paintings as detached and self contained worlds so Maas’s unrelenting units of repetition insist that all paintings are fragments of a larger system. If only we could see the pattern

Like Pollock, Maas makes images that are restless.  His forms appear to be identical yet some are fragments, others whole. Image to image they change in color, shift from flat to dimensional, up to down, and ground to foreground. All these changes generate a kind of movement - a motion that takes place in memory even more than on the painting itself. But coupled with the painted form’s suggested liquidity the illusion of motion becomes continuous, slow but unyielding.

Yet for all the intelligence of their visual references Maas’ paintings are also playful and unintimidating. In part that’s due to the bright acrylic colors he selects: vibrant reds, radiant yellows, glowing bubblegum pinks, jewel-like violets and blues. These are eye candy color delights in the pure-fun vein of Kenny Scharf’s newest pop-surrealist ‘splurt’ images. But with the equally seductive, but more serious,  all-you-need-is-color distillation of Karl Benjamin. Maas paints in transparent layers building depth and richness to achieve the vivid potency of his enervated color.  In return it gives his simple geometric forms an appealing cartoonish unreality that tones down the work’s suggestions of formal sophistication.

That lack of pretense and appreciation for the seductive power of pure painting is typical of the artist who makes a concerted effort not to think too much about his painting’s suggested meanings. Maas values the direct visual appeal of intense color that allows the spectator to enter into the abstract optical games he initiates. Once attracted however it is the pliant, interlocking forms that suggest the connections and relationships that make the images satisfying or intriguing. Wisely the artist allows those associations to remain open ended.

Escher once wrote about the mathematical principals upon which his art was based that they were,  “a gate leading to an extensive domain”. For him what lay beyond the gate was a riotous garden that he constantly imagined and re-imaged as nesting, shifting worlds and interwoven creatures. Within his warping, two-dimensional spaces visual paradox ruled and imagination soared. Maas’ domain is more abstract and clearly still evolving. But his enthusiasm for painting as a way to tenaciously explore visual concepts of space within illusions of motion and way he summons all the landscapes of memory promise to make the development worth watching.