Many writers have solemnized a union in Carl Morris’ paintings, of Northwestern America’s topography and the no-time mental state of Oriental wisdom literature. Certainly he agglomerates chunky components into images readable as landscape. Yet for all their massivity and wedging, an intrinsic emptiness is lodged at the core of the images. The hollowness palpable within the experience of these works mocks the painter’s pastiche of monumentality. This is because Morris directs his art toward the apparent rather than the essential and functional. He seems oblivious of the Chinese maxim: “Idea present; brush may be spared performance.” His dribbles, textural graining and matrix effects are handsome but they have been achieved prematurely. Perhaps in Implosion or Light Bole if Morris had intuited more clearly the nature of sucked or cubbyholed energy, he would have resisted the temptation to splatter and ridge grandiose facades. Recognizing the reality of form-giving cause is so vivid an encounter that it would restrain even Action Regionalism.
—Rosalind G. Wholden
