29th May - 21st June 2008Opening: 29th May 2008Mali Morris: |
Mali Morris: New Paintings
Strange Links: Guide to Morris Mali Morris is a painter who makes you think about paint, and
whose paint asks you to think about light. She is not concerned with
making paintings represent recognisable objects, but the world, through
light effects, is in her paintings. Talking to her about how she goes
about them, making and remaking until she finds them “right”, it is
clear that what she asks them to be is luminous, glowing and
transparent. She wants light to be constructed chromatically, and for
colour to get to the paintings by her own touch, in ways and means that
seem new to her. Her paintings are alive not just to a history of
abstraction, but in a dialogue with her own method of experimentation.
The issues seem to be light and rhythm, and what painting is. Morris’s paintings are made by first laying in rectangles of colour
that look balanced and right together, and after the paint is dry
overlaying these with a field of new colour so the rectangles are
obscured. Then parts of the still wet overlay are removed so that
discs of hazy colour appear within a field of another colour. What’s there? Colours and shapes in a dynamic relationship to each
other, to the edges of the painting and to the surface from which
they’ve been picked out. A balance of elements -- how is it pitched?
Is there a drama, is it believable, is there something arresting,
important, light-hearted, unglib, something recognisable like light
falling on objects, a metaphor for how life seems? Is it a gag or a
painting? This is the process Morris works to, finding colour rather than
adding it, doing something and doing it again, or leaving it alone, or
appearing to leave it alone but actually laboriously fiddling with it
(she might glaze a circle, or pick at the edges of another with some
tool, a matchstick maybe) until what seemed to be in the first instance
the right, fresh, instant, new, thoughtful and believable image
actually is as much all those things as it can possibly be. What resonance do Morris’s paintings have: nature, art, life, ideas,
morality and so on? The answer is partly that they engage with a
modern artistic tradition that many different types of artists feel at
home with, writers, musicians, painters, and so on, that is about
compression, spontaneity and chanciness, and having faith in the
unprepared gesture but also a sense of knowledge and experience
informing the various giddy leaps that the artist takes. In this
tradition humanity is all-important but it must be conveyed through
pared-back means. This tradition like any other can ossify so it’s an academy, or it
can be worked at so it comes alive again. Perhaps you have to come at
it from an angle in order to rediscover what it is. In Morris’s case
she takes what might be a contemporary graphic device, the world of
printing, and turns it over, and looks at it, and says, OK, this is how
paint is different from print. Here’s a good one with a mauve ground and circles of more or less
red – entitled Loula. All the issues are here. Looking at it and
describing it can be a key to reading the whole show. The chalkiness of the mauvey colour in Loula is given a vivid
counterpoint by the red circles. The swish of the mauve marks is a
precise expression of the edge of the canvas, and the stops and starts
of the sweeping marks are in a dynamic relationship with the
positioning of the circles, where they have been found (or cleared,
uncovered or excavated – in fact the mauve has been wiped and repainted
many times, with different circles, in different colours, covered and
uncovered, until just the two reds make it). The eye is diverted from
the emphatic series of brush-mark stops in the top right corner by the
red circle that floats off the edge of the field. The one deliberate
stop-mark within the field, at the centre bottom of the canvas, is
accompanied by another vivid circle. The swishy, brushy marks tell you
about light and shade, since they’re striated with darkness from the
colour of the ground beneath the mauve. If none of this is fully a
conscious endeavour – the glow, the movement, the careful placement --
it comes from a history of looking at and understanding art and its
nature as both strategic and involuntary. The width of the circles in Loula relates to the width of the brushy
marks. These repetitions are part of the success of the work. Up and
down marks on the left are contrasted with marks from side to side –
the field is divided in this way – almost but not quite halves. This
relates to the almost but not quite contained circles within the field.
The area by which the red circle is intersected, relates to the amount
the red circle below is contained within the canvas. These are musical
rhythms, and it isn’t surprising that she has photos on her studio wall
– “as a reminder and for inspiration” -- of the jazz musicians Derek
Bailey and Paul Rutherford. Rutherford, who died recently, was a trombonist. Morris used to
hear him play, in various combinations of other free-improvisers, very
memorably with the late John Stevens, drummer. She realised quite
quickly that they were experienced, talented, disciplined musicians,
whose chosen structures of composition/playing depended on taking
risks. They seemed to push each other towards invention and discovery
of form -- towards expression -- and there was a kind of on-going
guarding against cliché in this process. She quotes John Fordham’s
obituary comment about Bailey in the Guardian (29 December 2005), that
he “likened improvisation to spontaneous relationships and
conversation, full of accidental harmonies, misunderstandings, passion
and indifference.” Lately, in the studio, she’s been listening to Bob Dylan & The
Band: Genuine Basement Tapes. “It’s all laid bare, they’re working on
the songs -- finding out as they go along. On the other hand, Schubert
played by Brendel can also sound like improvisation to me, both in
composition and performance. Form, meaning, unfolding.” “In painting it works differently,” she says. “If I have any faith
in improvisation as an aspect of what I do, it's because it can show a
way to unfamiliar relationships and structures which interest me,
intrigue me. It offers new possibilities of investigation.” The negotiation between strategy and improvisation takes place
within the world of the studio, with all its practicalities, and its
impractical hopes. “But when I’m trying to solve the painting problems which crop up,
it doesn’t always feel like negotiation, it can feel more urgent. I
think in the way I work there is a relationship between urgency and
detachment, between knowing and not knowing, and this has to be lived
through, or painted through.” Why create paintings like this today? Because the formal issues
they’re about feel urgent to the artist, and because, even if often
unconsciously, they can have an urgency for everyone. These abstract
values relate to a history of art, which is about constantly coming up
with visual metaphors for experience, much more than it is about
narrating experience. And this metaphor-world is common to all. It’s
just that not everyone has the job of intellectualising about it, as a
critic does, or producing it in the form of visual pleasure or beauty,
as an artist does. Matthew Collings 2008 |