Rosser intentionally seeks to connect contemporary painting to the broad narratives that anchor our world. His images simultaneously merge flashback with feedback, forcing abstraction to go forward and reckon with both its history and impending destiny. In a moment when the cynicism of postmodernism has subsided. Rosser realized that all sources and references are suddenly open, viable and equal. His work welcomes diverse linkages. It may relate to the template-based paintings of Gary Stephen, especially those romantic abstract landscapes of the late-1980’s. Or, the motif might descend from the work of the British painter William Scott, from the attenuated pot and pan forms that recur throughout Scott’s reduced compositions of the 1970’s. By activating painting’s recent and sundry histories, and be allowing references to proliferate in multiple directions that require ”tracking”, Rosser plugs into the information-sharing paradigm that is the hallmark of our moment.

With Rosser’s work older existential concerns-those ambitious gestures which enthralled the Abstract Expressionists—are supplanted by issues of transmission. Information, rather than existence, is what drives Rosser’s visual discourse. The interlocking, angular linear networks that appear in Mainframe Tracks, False Echo and Side-swipe Clangor become schematic illustrations of the new cyber-structure. These circuits of color, overlap and intersect, producing a network that run parallel to that of the inserted motifs. Rosser uses abstraction to ponder the parameters of our expanding and imploding world, and to imagine how these boundaries might appear. Each canvas becomes a glimpse into the surging, pulsing environments of structure and sensation. The formal motif Rosser relies upon to envision these episodes of transmission appears like a pendulum set in motion: oscillating between metaphorical figure and pure painter emblem. Or, as Richter stated in a well-known interview with Benjamin Buchloh, the aim is “to bring together in a living viable way the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom. Not paradise”.