David M. Roth reviews the exhibition Ed Moses: Yesterday's Tomorrow at Brian Gross Gallery, San Francisco, on view through October 26, 2013.

Roth writes: "This show of ten mostly large-scale works finds Moses in top form, reinvigorating past motifs with fresh methods. The latest is a craquelure achieved by mixing acrylic paint with some unnamed substance that, when manipulated, 'carves' spidery skeins into the grounds of his monochromatic canvases… Here, the surfaces appear to have been chiseled or imprinted as if with a wood block; at some points the paint actually peels. Prolonged viewing, however, suggests that shrinkage is the real cause. Whatever the case, the process is neither random nor fully controlled, but more like a carefully calibrated randomness if such a thing can be said to exist…. The result [is] a kind of gothic/seriocomic Minimalism."