With the renewal of interest in painting observed over
the last few years, an interest focused on traditional genres such as portrait painting, or on elegant post-abstract decorative
pictures, or even on the resurgence of symbolic narratives so elaborate that we even come to witness the return of old-fashioned,
pre-Modern, pre-Craig Owens literary and figural allegories; a painter like Ivan Morley stands out as an exigent maker of
adventurous yet whimsical paintings that haven’t denied or abandoned the desire for pure “retinian” pleasure.
The complexity and variety of his paintings are at first glance
bewildering, as Morley seems to jump effortlessly from abstract to figurative painting blending together materials and techniques
a priori foreign to each other, not unlike his most obvious forerunner Sigmar Polke.
Morley may use in the same picture some simple, popular craft techniques and precious materials alike, or allude in the same
breath to Modern Masters and vernacular art folktales.
As with
Polke's work, we witness in Morley's paintings of the last few years a similar desire to link together unexpected
sources or references, the same experimental and irreverent approach to image making by agglomerating diverse mediums and
materials contradictory in nature. Like Polke, Ivan Morley creates a visual vocabulary out of apparently heterogeneous elements
that make his idiosyncratic paintings immediately recognizable as such despite the various identities they assume: the oval-shaped
paintings recalling classical emblems and insignias, the thread pieces, or the semi-abstract floral glass paintings.
This manifest heterogeneity is deceptive, as Morley's œuvre is driven and unified by the desire to investigate the possibilities of painting, something he
approaches by circumventing the loaded vocabulary of tradition. Circumvention however doesn't imply avoidance, and Morley,
well aware of the potential for failure in such an ambitious enterprise, accomplishes his painterly goals by several means.
Failure itself plays an interesting role, since Morley capitalizes on failed attempts, deviations or “things that go
wrong” within his working process. Morley's strategies in
making painting can be summarized as such: the exploration of conventional and non-traditional painting techniques alike;
the reliance on narration and the remembrance of hearsay as a starting point, and a profound engagement and curiosity for
historical painting.
Morley's relentless exploration of obscure subject matters as
a pretext for meticulously fabricated, visually stunning artworks is outwardly united by constant references to apparently
absurd narratives in the construction of groups1 such as A
True Tale; From Don, George and Diane; or Tehachepi (sic).
These
narratives may for example be built on a story heard during Morley's childhood; they may refer (as the artist tells us)
to murky memories of local conversations, allusions to local and/or famous artists' quotes or rumors about them, or to
apparently senseless or random anecdotes.
Ultimately these elaborate
stories, however entertaining, are unnecessary to the viewers’ engagement with the finished painting in the sense that
they are not a crucial key to their comprehension. Morley's paintings are not mere illustrations of his narratives, nor
are they any attempts at making ideological or theoretical points. Unlike many of his contemporaries using narrative in painting
at present, Morley doesn't create allegories.
Nevertheless
his narratives are indispensable as a step, a pretext to begin constructing pictures, in his path to engage with such concerns
as purely formal tropes or the decorative. This is most patent in Morley's patient production of textile patterns, such
as A True Tale, 2006 which may
evoke some vague Abstract Expressionist patterns but in this particular case happens to be “an attempt that went wrong
to depict the sails of a ship”. A True Tale started in fact as a tentative monochrome
in the bottom part, and then the rectangular sails became a grid, resulting in a tall, vertical composition of layered colors.
In A True Tale the tradition of maritime
painting with its foggy seascapes, proud billowing sails, translucent renditions of splashing and raging waters has been used
as a starting point These elements are later progressively obscured and layered into an abstract embroidered vertical panel,
becoming in essence a totally different object altogether from what was initially planned. This is where Morley's artistic
integrity and intellectual humility come out at their best, when the artist embraces a setback in a planned project, and makes
the most of it by turning the situation to his advantage. Calling the result a happy “accident” would be an exaggeration
since the magnificent thread “painting” results from a longish, painstaking process of embroidery. Rather, it
is an honest attempt at using different means, i.e. thread instead of paint, to engage with a certain topic of painting tradition
encompassing everything from Jakob van Ruysdael to Claude Monet to Edward Ruscha, and succeeding in producing an entirely
new sort of tactile, sensual art object whose nature resides somewhere in between sculpture, painting, and decorative textile.
It should be noted here that the use of textile in Morley's thread, batik
and embroidery works is patently different from Sigmar Polke's. Unlike the German artist Morley doesn't appropriate
existing, manufactured fabrics but builds them up from scratch, learning some simple craft methods for the production of his
textile pieces2.
As in many of
his technical endeavors, Morley had to learn some basic skills (in this case machine embroidery) in order to be able to achieve
his project. The artist is quick to point out that acquiring these basic skills in non-traditional painterly techniques doesn't
make him an “accomplished” craftsman, far from it3. Morley is rather an explorer
in semi-forgotten, often overlooked or even scorned crafts, discarded from what is often the lofty, serious and self-conscious
realm of painting's Western tradition.
This exploration of unusual methods of artmaking and unorthodox materials
in order to attain the visual goals Morley sets out for himself4 leads occasionally to sensationalism
and confusion. Much has been written for example about the use of a personal lubricant (K-Y Jelly) in the making of
Morley's paintings. The artist is obviously well aware of its sexual connotations and acknowledges he finds them humorous.
He however explains he ended up using KY Jelly as he needed the equivalent of what is known as a “resist” in sculpture,
what in this case is merely a technical aid to prevent oil paint from sticking to the glass support he uses to form patterns.
Looking for a way to disengage from the loaded history associated
with the brushstroke, Morley had been using glass sheets to drop oil paint and to create his distinctive, characteristic anemone-shaped
patterns. The glass surface ensures that the bottom part of each of these paint shapes remains perfectly flat. These are subsequently
lifted from the glass sheet while still wet and then glued on their final support by the power of the paint humidity, in a
reverse process that makes the top of the finished painting surface absolutely flat.
Finally, to prevent the oil paint from sticking to this glass panel Morley needed a substance that would
be water-based, hence the K-Y Jelly. Additionally the lubricant is mixed with wax as it absorbs the glossy finish of oil paint,
making certain of the sheer and absolute flatness of the resulting painting, as in Tehachepi
(Sic), (2006).
What is interesting in Morley's use of
various techniques is the way he experiments with methods of artmaking that may appear at first glance craft-related but are
reintroduced into the realm of “serious” contemporary practice. A closer look at his glass paintings demonstrates
an intriguing historical circularity. Glass painting first appeared in Europe during the Italian Renaissance to produce precious
miniatures depicting religious scenes. Glass was expensive to manufacture and therefore reserved as a support for the most
noble subjects; the task was also entrusted to the best skilled painters: the reverse process of glass painting mandated to
paint the details first and the background last. Later, as glass became less expensive and easier to fabricate, the technique
was gradually adopted during the 17th and 18th century in folk art all over Europe. Like many folk-related craft objects,
glass painting slowly slipped into a discredited art practice, joining the ill-reputed domain of domestic crafts. So the return
of the technique, updated to suit Morley's attempt at sheer flatness in his disseminated compositions of floral all-over
(something a perverted Greenbergian mind probably could have never foreseen) really demonstrates how a resourceful artist
in need of reinventing each one of his new paintings could literally rehabilitate a disgraced craft into a wondrous tool.
Morley's glass paintings are a tour de force, not only because of the
complicated painting process at play but because he succeeds in making visually arresting paintings out of what is now essentially
a somewhat tacky pictorial technique mostly used throughout the late 20th century to make mock stained glass5
and almost never sanctioned by Modern Masters.
Very
ancient shapes and compositional tropes also appear in paintings like Emblem, or Logo (both 2005) mounted on oval panels. The oval was used in the history of classical
painting to make portraits, most particularly 18th century pastels. At the beginning of the Modern era it was rediscovered
and updated by Braque and Picasso for their Cubist still-lifes.
The
use of oval canvases thus has a long and distinguished past, concentrating as it does two thousand years of art history. Most
notably, Morley's oval paintings recall the motive of the Roman trophy, with its frontal representation of piled-up armors,
shields, helmets, javelins and swords looted from the vanquished enemy, these balanced compositions characterizing some of
the oldest graphic condensations of symbols and meaning.
As such
the trophy (also variously referred to as emblem or insignia) has given birth to a modern commercial incarnation, the logo.
As with glass painting, we are witnessing a slow descent of a powerful symbol into the everyday culture of marketing tools,
and its appropriation by Pop culture in the form of heavy-metal band logos. This is probably where Morley picked up the shape,
twisting the traditional representation (in Logo) to show strange masks, trucks, construction
equipment and airplanes as well as the mysterious “Clyfford Still Real Estate” sentence, alluding to a cryptic
comment the late Abstract Expressionist painter may have made on the phone about being more interested in real estate than
in art at the time the purported conversation took place.
Logo is one of these paintings about which knowing the initial story won't help to “get”
the work since the words seem so clearly dissociated from the objects depicted; it also relates to other paintings displaying
the “Clyfford Still Real Estate” phrase but accompanied this time by a phone number, as in From Don, George, and Diane, 2003.
In the latter
painting the number and the “Clyfford Still Real Estate” words are represented on a rickety sign outside a house,
as if we were looking at first at a banal, everyday scene, but with the odd addition of what at first appear to be floating
bubblegum-shaped pink clouds that are in fact hydrangeas. The phone number on the sign is actually a functioning number for
an actual realtor, something Morley explains as an attempt to make a picture that someone could call, compounding the link
between a symbolic image and “real life” with the desire to “help sell some real estate with the painting”6. This anecdote is exemplary of the whimsical and endearing aspect of Morley's work,
part of an added commentary that brings some entertainment value to the appreciation of his painting, but also shows the humility
and sometimes self-deprecation with which Morley approaches his task. If everything fails, if the attempt at reinventing each
painting anew is unsuccessful, then maybe this particular painting can have some social usefulness in the real world.
Elsewhere, the oval Emblem shows
a floating figure made up of an empty mask associated with some disembodied limbs holding a couple of drumsticks. The composition
shares a faint similarity to Magritte's The Liberator (1947, Los Angeles County
Museum of Art), a painting Morley has seen but didn't conscientiously mean to quote or emulate. The floating elements
seems obvious in the comparison, but a closer inspection shows that the limbs and masks in Emblem
are so separated that no physical body is represented, rather, elements are piled up in a trophy-like composition7.
Emblem and the oval-shaped paintings are exemplary of the concatenation of historical
art tropes, mundane anecdotes and everyday images present in Morley's art.
The shape itself is representative of the artist's many strategies of diversion in engaging with the heroic
tale of Modern painting. The oval has been chosen consciously for its distance from the conventional rectangular canvas but
also to make an object halfway between painting and sculpture, whose materiality would counterbalance what amounts to an impure,
non-reductive opticality of the picture.
But in a post-media,
post Internet world, it often proves impossible to escape from the visual white noise of thousands years of art history, mass
media and Pop culture concatenated in an everyday stream of images. It is as if art itself had been swallowed whole in the
collective unconscious, chewed and regurgitated in vague, half-forgotten, half-remembered lumps of semi-iconic pictures always
lurking in the back of our minds.
Therefore Morley's attempts
to evade references to the obvious expectations of what a painting should be often end up bringing back other historical comparisons.
If the Abstract Expressionist heroes are successfully circumvented, then Cubism immediately comes back to mind. If we want
to disregard Cubism and throw it out the front door, then Byzantine mosaics or 18th century portraiture return through the
window.
In this sense it could appear at first that Morley's
whole enterprise would have been too ambitious, had he tried and set out to radically transform “Painting in general”
instead of simply and humbly embarking on the invention of his own singular paintings, one at a time. If he had attempted
such a grandiose task, it would have certainly been doomed to failure since “our expectations of what a painting should
be” can only be imprinted by the ghostly presence of a century of Modernism, marred by confusing and conflicting theories
promulgated after the fall of formalism, haunted by the teleological narration of centuries of Classical art. As Morley states
himself, strategies of circumvention in trying to thwart our idées reçues
about painting often end up being circumvented themselves by the unreliability of memory.
The capricious unpredictability of memory is intimately linked with art historical references to Modernist
painters. In addition to the aforementioned Clyfford Still, Morley refers in Bad Memory
of a Good Painting (2006) to Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky. This work literally quotes “from
memory” archetypal paintings by the trio of émigré European artists whose teaching ultimately shaped Modernism
in America, but whose own works were considered of lesser interest than those of the Abstract Expressionist pioneers who succeeded
them. The three artists were chosen according to the vague memory of one of the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago
where Morley was a student in the late 1980s.
In Bad Memory of a Good Painting, we see a museum viewer, turning his back on us, looking at one of the paintings
in what clearly resembles a museum gallery situation, complete with wall labels. Except the paintings remembered in Morley's
painting may not be those installed at the time, but rather some generic visual reminiscence of these artists' styles.
To add to the blurred recollections, the wall labels depicted in Bad Memory…
are shown in reverse, leading us to conclude that the “remembered” paintings might also be depicted in reverse.
One can’t escape the feeling of having been sent right through the looking glass, and that in this reverse universe,
the stiff heroic criticism that filters our perceptions of these three Modern pioneers has magically morphed into “frabjous”
verses from the Jabberwocky.
Bad Memory… is emblematic of Morley's way of coping with the self-assigned task
of trying to build pictures and paintings not so much for the 21st century but that happen to exist after the 20th.
It is not an enterprise in rebuilding a new tradition for painting as a genre, but an everyday project that starts and ends
with each singular painting. Each one of them begins with painterly goals, most often as humble as trying to determine how
to deal with angles or corners in a particular composition, how to assemble colors in a way that wouldn't be determined
by taste or theory, how to experiment with lowly techniques while interpreting historical tradition without ignoring Abstract
Expressionist history.
To help accomplish these quotidian goals,
the means at Morley's disposal are humble and modest, the technique is patient, history and tradition are alluded to in
a humorous way through faded visual memories and funny but unreliable anecdotes about famous or not so famous artists.
What makes Morley's work so singular and exemplary, aside from the obsessive
craftsmanship, idiosyncratic way he has of using quotes, derivations and the subliminal messages of historical and modernist
art alike, is the work ethic and humble intellectual integrity that Morley brings to and makes manifest in each and every
one of his paintings.
1 Morley explains his preference for the word “group” over “series” by his wish to make
“color-coordinated” artworks as opposed to paintings that would be brought together by a similar subject developed
over a length of time. Phone conversation with the artist, October 11, 2006.
2 Ivan Morley also mentions Anni Albers' pioneer work
on textiles as an obvious reference in this context.
3
Phone conversation with the artist, op.cit.
4 To clarify this idea of “goals”, it should be noted that in Morley’s
words, if the conceptual aspirations and objectives he starts with are always met in his finished paintings, his visual ambitions
tend to deviate in the sense that many objects or images end up not looking the way we expect them to do.
5 An exception should be taken with Marcel Duchamp’s iconic
Large Glass (1915-1923) which was intended as a work that is anything but a painting,
as asserted in the extensive literature about the The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors,
Even. Paul Klee who was heading the glass painting workshop at the Bauhaus also comes to mind. Lastly, it is interesting
to note that Sigmar Polke studied glass painting in Düsseldorf from 1959 to 1960, before transferring to the Academy
of Fine Arts.
6 Though the artist never
called this number himself.
7 Emblem’s physical
oddness is accentuated by its support of sculpted leather, it also departs from the oval since it is shaped like a medieval
Norman shield.
