Exhibition
Christopher Colm Morrin
notes, Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp
13 January - 18 February 2024
-
Artist, poet and musician Christopher Colm Morrin has an expansive and regenerating creativity. Primarily a painter, he works at the edges of reality and perception, capturing moments of presence by brush on often small canvases. Marks and colours vary, and adjectives abound. Loud, fizzy, pulsing, wild, energetic, zingy. But also quiet, still, restrained. The paintings are always simple, always direct.
For this first solo show with Sofie Van de Velde ‘notes’, Morrin gives us a clue into these paintings’ workings. Notes. Fragmentary, incomplete messages. Utterances and gestures that deposit thought and capture a moment. We write notes because something inside of us must come out of us. We write notes in order not to forget. They exist because they must. The French poet Paul Celan said that a poem is like a handshake - is that not true of these paintings too?1 They assert I am here. They offer, here.
The paintings are made slowly, carefully, and with a phenomenal amount of attention. Morrin notices the everyday objects around him and gets present with himself and the world before he begins. As one of his favourite poets Mary Oliver writes ‘attention is the beginning of devotion’. He pays attention to the here and now, and it transports him - and hopefully us, too - somewhere else. There’s a journey from normality to the infinite.
Morrin is the messenger. His job as an artist is to ‘stay out of the way of how I think things should be’ on the surface of the canvas. Many of his paintings have an uncanny familiarity with things we have seen before, to forms we already know. Forrest Bess. Raul de Keyser. Richard Tuttle. Unnamed tantric painters from 17th century Rajastan. The square. The circle. The squiggle. The lines of energy and colours of delight. How to account for similarity and sameness, of familiarity and difference? These artists are united in their belief in art and presence, faith in the ability for shapes to be portals to the here and now. It is as it always has been.
Noticing the profound affect these strange paintings have on my mind and heart, 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.’
Shapes speak. And the title of this show tells us what to do. Notes, like music. Listen.
Text by Wells Fray-Smith.
The text of Wells Fray-Smith was written for the solo exhibition ‘notes’.
Wells Fray-Smith is a curator at the Barbican, London.