Michael Rose | Untitled space

A sort of argument or discussion was happening above my head in the curtained off loft above the viewing room. 

“Go downstairs and see who’s here”

Michael Rose, Self-Portrait with Steve, 2024, Image courtesy of The Untitled Space and the artist.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I was the one downstairs looking at Untitled Space’s solo exhibition of Michael Rose. I had been struck by the salon style hanging of his unstretched canvas work on the gallery wall. The images are colorful, vibrant explorations of the human psyche. The overall effect of the display was somewhat kaleidoscopic.

I mentioned that the work bears a resemblance to some of Francis Bacon’s portraits. The gallery director told me that many people had already made that remark. 

Michael Rose, Untitled 12, 2024, Image courtesy of The Untitled Space and the artist.

Bacon is known for bringing psychological drama to the abstracted figure. Bacon would say that he tried to ‘injure’ the likeness of his subject on the canvas. He would find the locus of his subject’s inner anguish and rip it open and then pour out the bile onto the canvas. Michael Rose’s portraits do indeed express his subjects’ inner psyche. However, it is Bacon without any of the fat - without the greasy turmoil and distress of the troubled psyche. 

Though slightly uncanny in their almost-human appearance, the figures in Rose’s portraits do not emanate an energy of tumultuous darkness, they are prisms of self-reflection and discovery. As if the body is energetically transparent, light passes through the center and refracts then separates into different wavelengths of color. 

Perhaps, during ‘unprecedented’ times, what we need more than an artist who paints the darkest depths of the human psyche, is someone who can bring light and color to an image of self. I will, of course, miss the juicy tenderness of the fatty bacon, but at least I won’t die of a heart attack.