Friday, April 12, 2019

Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu


(link)

during a time [1956 – 2004] of ostensible post-war optimism over scientific and economic explosion of the time, the space race, increasing ease of travel, the plane windows we were all finally travelling on instead seeing vast de Chiricoian wasteland, blatantly lonely. A world able to see itself for the first time from the eyes of god and yet Morris' paintings read it as abandoned, moon-like. The virtual plane of technological invention becomes synonymous with the pictorial plane of creative invention. That surrealist expanse that stood in for theaters in their skulls. Painting in that Matrix-like virtual plane - inventing what-you-wish - and yet a vast emptiness, like humanity's inability to imagine anything worth painting. It's pretty bold to say, "I have been given planes, spacecraft, worldly travel, and out my window I see only desolation, maybe some earth converted to farmland." "we are checked by the surface." a sort of comedic reversal, the virtual plane given immediately to its immanent form, paint crust, dust.


Read too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery