Malcolm Morley Flash Art International 38:243 (July-September 2005): 73.
Malcolm Morley, The Art of Oil Painting at Sperone Westwater, NY, NY, 5 May through 25 June.
Reviewed by Melissa Friedling
A painting career that has spanned about half a century may be the credential one needs to call one’s solo show “The Art of Oil Painting” -- a title teetering on the presumptuous, but indicative of Malcolm Morley’s career ambition to make painting the very topic of his art. British born and a New York resident since 1958, Morley’s name has become a requisite entry in any art historical account of “photo-realism,” renowned for his own brand of “super-realism.” His distinctive process involves taking found commercial images as source material, transposing them onto a grid, “pre-imaging” a sketch of each cell separately, and then painting largely from memory.
For this exhibition, Morley has turned to photojournalism as his starting place – spectacular images of catastrophe and contemporary sport. Employing his grid technique, he achieves a flattening, distortion, and a level of abstraction that is still highly representational. But, the oversized, heroic images of athletes in action, emblazoned with logos and advertising, can’t be abstracted enough from the overpowering and glorifying visual rhetoric of professional sports as an institution. The most interesting paintings are not sports related – an aerial view of a highway accident and a collapsed apartment building in Brooklyn. Both of these succeed in leveling the image plane for compelling compositions that send the eye everywhere over the busy scenes and do indeed invite a consideration of “the art of oil painting” itself.