Exhibition
Christopher Colm Morrin
Witnessing Change, Galerie Mutter Fourage, Berlin
19 February - 10 April 2023
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Shapes Speak
Like many of Christopher Colm Morrin’s paintings, Blindspot (2022), is an abstract scene with floating forms. A landscape? Maybe. There’s a horizon, a division between two registers in different colours, in this case, a pale blue as though a glimmering sky, and a chalky, sturdy white suggesting ground beneath. Curious? Definitely. Curved red marks lick upwards, their thick bases tapering then disappearing as the lines cross from the white zone to the blue zone. The lines transform and mutate into textured ochre vanishing points, blind spots. It is as though we are witnessing final ecstatic bursts of energy before the red marks burn out, vanishing into oblivion.
Blindspot seems to be a painting about what we see and what we do not, either because we cannot or we will not. We see what could be sky and land. Then we see unexplainable red marks and golden forms- what are those? Pathways, guiding lines? Pure abstractions? Who knows. We are blind. There are so many things we cannot see, cannot grasp, cannot know.
For the past 7 years, Morrin has been making enigmatic and philosophical paintings and works on paper that, like Blindspot, evoke and embrace the often hidden, underlying patterns of life and shifting nature of reality; states like mutability, impermanence and ambiguity. Initially trained in philosophy and psychoanalysis, his work has been driven by a deep, serious and irreverent questioning of reality in an attempt to get to grips with what is going on at any time, in any moment, any experience or sensation.
In his search, Morrin has created a widely eclectic body of work that playfully refuses to settle into any single register or signature style. His regenerating creativity leads to geometric shapes, suggestive lines, flat expanses of colour, voids and portals, textured gestures, delicate and direct applications of paint. As soon as a gesture or feeling starts to feel familiar, Morrin shifts gears and changes things. Witnessing change - as the show’s title suggests - is key: taken together, these paintings are lessons in difference and rallying cries against getting too clingy to an image, too attached to things being fixed.
Take Untitled (2021). Here, a cluster of colourful gestures congregates at the centre of the canvas. Blue, red, pink, yellow and brown smear and smudge into each other, slipping and sliding into a frenzy of energy. A black curve sweeps across the bottom right of the surface, dividing the canvas into light and dark and directing our eye back into the colourful world. Is this a street and a cityscape behind? Then there are works like Catalyst (2022), which feel radically different. There are similarities - instances of flat colour, instances of texture - but now the palette is restrained, the forms more direct, more superficial, more simple, more pure, more confounding. We are confronted with three sections of the canvas, divided symmetrically by two lines of red and black dots that look like they have been unzipped to reveal a central section with a dangling orb-like form. Seemingly clear and simple at first, the work collapses under our gaze.
As I notice (or project) recognisable elements, like a cityscape, street or zipper, I am reminded of the American painter Thomas Nozkowski, who draws a connection between familiarity and significance: ‘there is a demonstrable difference between a mark that means something and a mark that doesn’t mean anything. It’s in our DNA, left over from the millennia before words, when we “read” the world. We recognize marks that have meaning, shapes speak.’ Despite being abstract in form, the paintings and works on paper have a close connection to the perceptible world, though Morrin leaves the exact sources of forms ambiguous. Recently, Morrin has been taking photographs of shapes and lines he observes in the world, capturing them with a film camera which allows him to see, photograph and move on without judging and scrutinizing form, composition, quality. Morrin is ‘inspired by everything,’ and he is a master of noticing the underlying geometries of life - ranging from three minute dots in nature to the triangle of a lampshade - as generative for creating meaning and feeling.
Morrin’s shapes speak on their own terms and he is the messenger that brings them into being, rather than the author that writes their script, or the painter that tells us what things mean and what they are, as though a mark, a sign, a colour could mean one thing and one thing only. Part of the openness of signification is that Morrin himself does not always know what the forms are or what they may mean. For both paintings and works on paper, he proceeds with what he describes as an ‘unknown position, a co-relationship between myself and the work’ that keeps him ever responsive to accept the many possibilities of what a picture may be, and the many ways shapes might speak to the experience of life:
“The biggest kick that I get out of this process is when I’m getting caught out all the time and the material is talking back to me. It’s probably the most exciting feeling to not know what is coming towards you. It teaches you to breathe, to calm down, to forget who you think you are, to accept mistakes, accept that mistakes are not mistakes after all, to fail, to love your failures, how beautiful and fragile one is, how fragile an image can be, how with one movement everything can be lost or gained.”
Like Morrin, we have to navigate not knowing what is coming toward us. Looking at these paintings is a lesson in confronting ambiguity, uncertainty, awkwardness, and impermanence, such that there is very little separation between the work and ourselves. If the subject matter of these paintings is the mysterious forms, colours, and gestures, then the content seems to be us, our own states of being and experience, of noticing. As in painting, so too in life: we pay attention, we ask ‘what is going on?’
This is the joy and pleasure of looking at Morrin’s work. They are open, surprising, curious and strange, and, in that way, feel closely connected to a lineage of other painters who similarly have explored painting’s expanse rather than its categories, and who are likewise interested in what painting might be able to do, rather than what it is, means or represents. The visionary painter Forrest Bess comes to mind, as do Raoul de Keyser, Ilse D’Hollander and Nozkowski or living artists like Amy Sillman. Like the work of these artists, looking at Morrin’s work can be an experience of recognition, disbelief, relief, doubt, surprise, squirmishness and wonder all at once.
It is not easy to describe the workings of these paintings, or to use Nozkowski’s words, to explain how a shape might speak to our innermost lives, but they do. I am reminded of the American-British author Henry James, who once said that ‘we paint because there are things we cannot say.’ Painting gets at what words often cannot. Not being able to understand or explain these pictures - if you can even call them that - is useful, because it prompts a line of inquiry that leads us to their success: what happens when language and mental faculties fail? The key to these paintings is not to think about what they are of - to see them as images that can be read - but to witness their rich complexity as an attempt to get closer to the ineffable: things, feeling, states, energies, realities that cannot be reached but only approached.
If Morrin’s paintings teach anything, it is that the unknowability of painting can be the ultimate metaphor for the unknowability of life, and that paintings can be teachers if we let the shapes speak and are willing to listen.
Text by Wells Fray-Smith.
The text of Wells Fray-Smith was written for the solo exhibition catalogue “Christopher Colm Morrin: Witnessing Change”.
Wells Fray-Smith is a curator at the Barbican, London.