IVAN MORLEY’S COMPLEX, COLOR-S...
Ivan Morley’s complex, color-saturated paintings are visual extrapolations made within an associative game that starts with history. Born in Burbank, California in the mid-60s - seemingly a time and place of little history - Morley begins his work by excavating shards of little-known historical anecdotes and fact from LA’s frontier past in the mid 19th century. By painting exploratively on a variety of surfaces, including textured glass, wood panels, batik and dyed canvas, Morley expands the scope of his investigation beyond the literalness of recorded fact into a swirling mass of causal influence that is as hallucinatorily complex as actual lived experience, aka history.In Lab, 2001, exhibited at Frehrking Wiesenhofer in Cologne this Fall, Morley’s group of seven paintings begin with an explosion that took place in Bill’s Asphaltum-Camphene lab. ’Bill’ was luckily off the premises when the accident occurred, having stepped out to the drugstore for a cocktail.... The paintings in Lab, 2001 function like animation cells, depicting seven phases of a single moment. They stand alone, but can also be experienced as a lightning-quick montage of jumpcuts. Through this approach, Morley avoids the dichotomy between abstract and figurative painting. The series contains both. In Lab, (oil, soap, and KY jelly on panel), a clapboard shack on a bed of yellow red and orange flames floats on a cyclorama backdrop. The explosion hits in many-pointed stars, and pixilated colored glass breathes against the shack’s windows. Visually akin to amateur commercial signage - the hand-painted sheep and cows that adorn the carniceria storefronts in LA’s Hispanic neighborhoods - this painting functions as the master shot. In a second Lab, (oil on glass), Morley moves in for a close-up. Using color to enhance the existing pattern of the translucent textured ‘privacy glass’ (once used for office doors and transoms), it’s made on, the painting looks like a gorgeous sea-anenome whose fiery amorphous heart pulses within a bed of muted blues and earth tones. In a third Lab, (oil on glass) the anenome explodes into a pixilated color field, which Morley achieves by selectively enhancing some textured patterns in the glass and obscuring other portions. The craft employed is reminiscent of meticulously rendered 19th century Bavarian glass folk icons. The painting, From Lab, (oil, thread, batik on canvas) is a cartoon-dream derived directly from the story: a cocktail set-up on a bar, some sugar cubes, a book of matches. Lab’s original shack is...."