Emily Roz: The Rutting Season @ Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn, NY by Wayne Adams

The wisest people I know tend to have an ability I find both refreshing and extremely valuable. They can speak to people on a basic level, in simple terms, and at the same time communicate a nuanced perspective that resonates long after the conversation has ended. This is the sense I get from the artist Emily Roz, through her new exhibition of paintings at Front Room Gallery titled, “The Rutting Season.” The artist operates between conceptual parameters of sex and violence, set in the animal kingdom - between natural beauty and savage destruction - where she subsequently reveals to the viewing audience a complex understanding of the human condition.

Sex and violence are central to most of the exquisitely detailed paintings - largely made up of animals devouring one another among lush greenery, but with additional images of starkly beautiful tree branches and vegetation. The works, however, are too rich to be quickly reduced to these descriptors. Roz has complicated the initial impulse one might have to such grotesque scenes as “Displaced Carcass,” “Lone Pine Road,” (2010) with an almost relentless reminder of natural beauty. It’s this interplay of contradictions that holds your attention once the seductive brushwork has drawn you in.

Roz reminds us, as a matter of fact, that sex is a primal and essential part of life - “In The Rut” (2011) illustrates this plainly. No less present or important is beauty, demonstrated in “Magnolia Seed Pod” (2011) - yet not without an ominous undercurrent. What does it mean to balance such contradictions? Why are the most beautiful aspects of life so often surrounded by pain? For Emily Roz, the paintings in “The Rutting Season” become a means of expressing something about her own life and environment - an expression at once intensely personal and universally accessible.

Using wild animals metaphors for humanity isn’t a particularly new idea. Doing so in a way that is both refreshingly honest and contemporary is another thing altogether. It’s a bit of wisdom well worth seeking out.