Paul Mosse

JUST when you think that Paul Mosse's frenetic journey into abstraction is complete, his pictures have a habit of throwing up half recognised shapes. Fragments of something almost familiar, scraps of chaotic wilderness frequently turn up among the turbulent filigree which fills his card, paper and board images.

Mosse, produces his idiosyncratic pictures by combining elements of painting and collage with a little drilling. Lines of cut out card wander across grand surfaces, changing hue, dwindling and becoming engorged, disappearing like underground streams, only to appear way across the plane. He prises apart, and then reunites, elements of colour and pattern, producing a surface of hypnotic complexity.

At one time, elements of landscape and foliage were clearly the inspiration for Mosse's work, but now often all that remains of this earlier interest are a series of strong horizontal divisions, ghostly echoes of distant horizons. The legacy of pointillism, too, is dwindling, replaced by, a debt to Dubuffet, whose violent convolutions Mosse's pictures occasionally evoke.

This undertow of violence seems to increase in intensity with Mosse's most recent work. A pair of chunky objects from 1995 shows Mosse pressing on still further into the third dimension. Instead of layer upon layer of lacy paper, card and paint, however, these two unapologetically sculptural pieces feature deeply distressed plywood, cracked, smashed and, shattered into a forbidding inferno of orange craters and canals.