Munro Galloway. Chairs Missing

About

A chair is good to paint because it stays still but you can easily move it. A chair is a one-to-one map of the human body, with legs, arms, seat, back and sometimes a headrest. When a body sits in a chair, you forget about the chair and concentrate on the person. The chair disappears and a conversation begins. A chair anchors you to a specific place. It lowers your body and directs your gaze. It holds you still. Matisse was criticized by Picasso for painting armchairs because they were too bourgeois. But according to Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse just wanted you to relax so your eyes and mind could wander. Paradoxically, sitting in a chair encourages both concentration and distraction.

A folding chair is something like a Rorschach test: it doesn’t serve its purpose until you open it up. A therapist once told me that the question asked during a Rorschach test is: “What could this be?” In other words, the point of the test is not to determine what the image is, but to imagine the possibilities. In these paintings the chairs are missing, they’ve been painted out of the picture. So here are paintings, not of chairs, but of color, form, pattern, space, places, ideas, questions, conversations, dreams, memories, and of myself.