From flat rectangular paintings to sculptural assemblages, and even a tutulike object on a pole (the relic of a performance), there seem to be several painterly works in Victoria Morton’s latest exhibition that challenge our understanding of the medium and the sorts of works that can hold up as painting. Despite these physical manifestations, her ecstatic applications of paint come to the fore, creating atmosphere and tempo via joyful, sparkling bursts of color as well as moody introspective passages, all conveyed in a dance of pigment on surface. Through changes of rhythm, crescendos, and sudden moments of intensity, Morton’s handling of paint recalls the act of playing music, an activity that the Glaswegian is devoted to, particularly as a member of the band Muscles of Joy.
Neither abstract nor nonrepresentational, Morton’s latest work is also neither sculpture nor painting but instead something between the two. (She has described her paintings as an “explicit abstract realism.”) Her work speaks of an engagement with the world, albeit as a painter. One thinks of Cézanne, who, describing Monet as “only an eye,” conceded, “But what an eye!” These two Frenchmen offered other ways to construct pictures of the world on canvas, and they opened our minds to new possibilities for thinking about painting. Morton takes our eyes and bodies on a similar journey but in reverse: the possibility of painting the world in the sense of physically adding pigment to it. Like pieces of furniture and objects that we find in studios, stained and marked, Morton literally offers painting as thing-in-the-world.
