Bob van Orsouw

Paul Morrison became known for his on-site installations at the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles and at ICA in London, for his solo exhibitions at the Las Vegas Art Museum and group exhibitions at MoMA, New York and the Tate Britain in London.

Morrison’s monochrome landscapes were once described as a “combination of gently rounded forms derived equally from Walt Disney and the rigor of the botanical draftsman, led by a scientifically determined relationship to the real world”. And indeed, his pictures and wall works evoke the cartoon-like simplicity of the Disney style. And his reduction of complex botanical configurations down to simple forms is preceded by an exact study and an almost scientific classification. The artist—who, among other things, is inspired by old English books on botany—also uses botanical terminology as picture titles. Yet Morrison calls this objective relationship constantly into question by inscribing the factually established data with something ambivalent and latent.

Looking at Morrison’s works, we find ourselves recalling the way our language functions. His schematic depiction of a tree is like an imprecise lecture on our subjective perception, just like the general term “tree” only imperfectly describes the empirical diversity of trees. His standardized-seeming depictions of nature point to the fact that an object, despite its recognizability, is never conclusively portrayable.

Morrison breaks up the flatness of his compositions by painting horizons or window-like cutouts that, similar to classical genre painting, allow a view onto the landscape beyond and thus suggest linear perspective. He skillfully mixes the genres by bringing the still life, landscape painting and the portrait to a new hybrid form. Single pictorial elements are painted in an overhead or frontal shot; proportions are shifted and, in an extreme close-up, zoom effects suggested.

His thrifty use of his means and the maximum exploitation of the contour recall Japanese woodcuts, still lifes by Roy Lichtenstein or illustrations by Audrey Beardsley. Morrison deploys acrylic paint, ink or gold leaf on different picture supports such as aluminum or canvas. With sculptures and depictions in relief he ruptures the homogeneity of the two-dimensional plane. In our exhibition, Morrison will, among other things, execute an expansive wall painting. Via a virtuoso game of positive and negative forms, as well as with different, non-coherent visual angles, the artist prompts a decentered feeling in the viewer—an appeal to rethink the usual practice of visual and verbal attribution in a happy-go-lucky way.

Birgid Uccia

Vernissage: Friday, 24 September 2010, starting 6 pm in the presence of the artist