September 12 to October 27, 2018
257 Bowery (between Stanton and Houston streets)
New York City, speronewestwater.com

In stand up comedy, there can be a thin, easily crossed line between aggressive hilarity and remarks that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic. A great performer needs to identify and respect these limits. Is it also possible for a painter to go too far? People used to think that Francis Picabia had done so with his ‘bad paintings’, works that inspired David Salle in the 1980s. But now Picabia, and maybe also Salle, belong to the postmodernist canon. Many commentators felt that Giorgio de Chirico, in his later works depicting gladiators and horses, had gone off the deep end, losing touch completely with the inspiration of his haunting early cityscapes. But nowadays it seems unacceptable for retrospectives to include only his early and widely admired masterpieces. The lessons of art history teach critics who reject the transgressive to take care.

Forty years ago Malcolm Morley became famous for his photorealist paintings. Then he had a long, highly successful career, demonstrating an amazing ability to work in a variety of disparate styles. In the 1980s, for example, he was identified as an important Neo-Expressionist. Now, in pictures completed in the three years before his recent death, Morley shows close focus pictures of armored knights. In Piazza d’Italian with French Knights (2017) two knights find themselves in a de Chiricoesque cityscape; in Melee at Agincourt (2017), a canvas of six by nine feet, a crowded field of mounted knights is on a yellow monochromatic background. And French and English Knights Engaged in Mortal Combat (2017) shows a joust in front of a lovingly detailed castle, with a sailing ship in the background. The great plaids in Italian Knight (2016) may recall modernist grids. And the vast green and yellow fields behind the knights in Tilting (2017) might remind you of the backgrounds in Alex Katz’s classic portraits.

Like many boys, Morley loved playing with toy soldiers – in the exhibition catalogue Nicholas Serota notes that his art demonstrates “the way we retain deep in our memory visual triggers to our profound psychological experiences, to our encounters with each other, and our relationship with the material world around us.” Via Paolo Uccello’s Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (1438-40), the nineteenth-century Scottish history painter James Henry Nixon, and Lawrence Olivier’s 1944 film Henry V, Morley learned how to compose battle scenes.

However bizarre new artworks appear, it’s always possible to adduce sources and argue that they extend visual tradition, in a meaningful way. But for me, these new Morleys stand to history painting the way Liberace’s Chopin stands to normal pianists’ performances. Most of these pictures are absurd, so obviously, deeply silly that I cannot imagine an art world in which they would be taken seriously. Still, I grant that one painting is a real achievement. In The Ultimate Anxiety (1978), the second largest work in the show, a line of freight train cars runs diagonally across the Venetian lagoon, which is filled with gondolas and a golden ceremonial barge, with Venetians observing from the quayside. When in the 1840s a train bridge was built in Venice, John Ruskin worried that his favorite city had been ruined. Morley’s visual commentary, is an inspired update of an, alas, all too real concern for the fate of Venice. One could say, I believe, that the painting makes a fantasy out of Ruskin’s fear. But after that, I think, Morley went too far.

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April 18 to June 6, 2015
257 Bowery (between Stanton and Houston streets)
New York, 212 999 7337

Turner Prize-winning painter Malcolm Morley is currently exhibiting a striking new body of paintings and installation works at the Sperone Westwater. An accompanying monograph has also been published by the gallery. Throughout his expansive 60-year career, Morley has deftly surfed between rigid art-world categorizations such as abstraction, Pop art, photorealism and Expressionism. Ignoring such strictures has allowed Morley to stay true to his subjects — most recently his fascination with military histories and vintage paper models of planes — and, in the process, reveal hints of his own life story and obsessions.

The artist’s fascination with war harkens back to his boyhood in London. During World War II enemy forces bombed his family’s home. The family hurriedly left the house that night, never to return and Morley was deeply affected by this tragedy. During my recent visit to his Long Island studio, he revealed that his last, most poignant memory of home was the distinct image of his newly painted model airplane left sitting on the windowsill of his bedroom.

In these recent works, Morley scripts his color-laden fighter planes, battleships, forts and cannons into raucous, nonsensical battle scenarios — combinations of events and timelines plausible only from a child’s point of view. His recurrent lexicon of war imagery, adapted from vintage toys and model kits, once again resurfaces here. They evince a subtle but important shift in technique, towards a more expressionist brush mark, a loosening of the underlying grid, and a distortion or abstraction of surface. Buttery, sensuous brushstrokes compete with more textural applications of paint. In Freighter with Primary Colors and B2 Bombers (2013), paint is applied as physically articulated marks, both dry-brush and juicy, in stippled applications. The textural elements indicate splashing waves and bombs dropping. Meanwhile, deftly modeled tones of blue and white create poetic transitions in the sky and clouds. The bands of color that make up the deck of the sea vessel are slab-like marks that create tension and physicality as abstraction, a merger of historical fact and pure artistic license. The B2 bombers in this painting are decorated with a variety of stripes and patterns borrowed from aircraft insignia used to guide pilots in recognizing allied aircraft and sea vessels more effectively in the era before advanced radar and radio technologies took over. In the painting Dakota,(2015) the carnivalesque battle engages military forces of historical implausibility. With exaggerated, child-like renderings, history hits the blender as a Viking ship, lighthouse, train and German fighter plane are orchestrated across a silky cobalt green expanse. Although he is depicting naturalistic imagery, Morley does so by magnifying the abstract nature of his materials and subjects.

A number of works in the show incorporate paper assemblage and mixed media installation. In The Searchers (2014) two hand-decorated model airplanes are physically affixed to the cloudy blue sky of the painting plane at oblique angles. Morley explains he attaches the planes as such “to create shadows.” In the largest and most ambitious work in the show, Napoleon Crossing the Alps with Cannon (2014), painting and sculptural components merge into a theatrical, diagrammatic installation. The artist renders Napoleon on horseback, his equestrian pose borrowed from the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. A paper-and-encaustic cannon, replete with a stack of cannonballs, occupies the floor space in front of the painting, the weaponry aimed directly at the portrait. They’re a commanding presence, seemingly attacking Napoleon’s portrait and the regal militarism for which it stands.

Twisting military fact with fiction, Morley’s illogical narratives can sometimes bewilder beyond patient observation. But the vintage model airplanes, now a primary component of his illusionist reliefs, expand our experience beyond the nostalgia of his biography into a critique of dominant culture’s obsession with militarism. More importantly, their presence on and around the painted image allows for a heightened experience of time and place, both real and imagined, by creating a theatrically staged experience of Morley’s underlying narrative.

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