Ce Roser at Sebastian Gladstone, New York

To look at the work of Ce Roser, across a career of more than sixty years, it is somewhat surprising to find how much can be suggested by a relatively small group of paintings made between the late 1970s

into the 1980s. These nine works do not summarize her activity so much as they offer a view into it. At one hundred and one, Roser continues to work with a clarity that feels undiminished, and her first solo exhibition in more than thirty years brings these paintings into view again.

The paintings in Ten to Get Ready, and Ten to Go suggest a range of affinities, such as Japanese calligraphy, Impressionism, and color field painting, though none are stated directly. The touch is light but deliberate. Thin layers of oil accumulate so that the surface seems at once shallow and deep, as if it had been built gradually rather than composed at once. Color moves across the canvas in arcs and intervals that might recall landscape or weather, or something more interior. There are moments that bring to mind painters such as Hilma af Klint or Charmion von Wiegand, though Roser’s work does not depend on comparison. It avoids the completeness often associated with color field painting, and instead proceeds through adjustment and repetition, as if the painting were arriving at itself over time.

Roser has worked in this way since the 1960s, developing a language that is consistent without

being fixed on one idea or formal impulse. From her studio on the Upper West Side, overlooking the Hudson River, she has had before her a view that is never quite the same—trees, boats, light, and weather shifting throughout the day. It is not that these things appear directly in the paintings, but that their movement and variability seem to have been absorbed into them. The space of the painting feels open, though not expansive, and the marks and hues of color register as both independent and related.

The paintings in Ten to Get Ready. And Ten to Go exist somewhere between description and invention, where the distinctions of genre or canon are less important. What becomes noticeable instead is the way the surface holds attention. Bands of color meet at slight angles, and small marks

interrupt or continue their movement. The eye follows these changes without settling. There is a sense that the painting is still in motion, even as it remains fixed. What is left is less an image than a kind of attentiveness, as if the act of looking has altered something, however slightly.