ALEX GENE MORRISON | Dark Matter

About

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Alex Gene Morrison with his first London one person show since 2006. In this new collection Morrison employs a highly personalised language in order to engage with a universal cosmology. Suspended delicately between representation and abstraction, forms advance and recede to suggest an outer worldliness that is somehow beyond and even pre or post human. Morrison creates an inter-dimensional realm that is at times enticing and other times foreboding. Complimentary and subtle colour combinations might project stillness and harmony whilst abrasive, electric codes suggest the clinical, infirm or incubatory. But whilst Morrison maintains a stance of implication and illusiveness he still affirms a sapient presence by means of absence or in suggesting transitory movement. A stone slab in an empty room tells us that something was once here, most likely extinguished, and warns of an ultimate finality. Portals, gateways or corridors convey a journey, a point of crossing over from one state to another. Human or sentient beings were or are present in primitive or futuristic form. Whilst nodding towards now retro futuristic film such as Stanley Kubrick's ‘2001: A Space Odyssey' or Franklin J. Schaffner's ‘Planet of the Apes', both of 1968, Morrison also references 20th century abstract painting. Glimpses of Kazimir Malevich, Ad Reinhardt or Peter Halley can be traced in Morrison's layering of form and colour. There is an acute awareness of the materiality of paint where subtle shifts in tone, texture and direction of application combine to create spatial and perspectival shifts; and underpainting and repainting bring our attention to the built surface. An inquiry into the equivocal, therefore, is underpinned by a rigorous investigation into paint itself.