The Refused: January 2013

The Refused

Recent Paintings by Michael Morley

A considered search for the psychedelic without resorting to hallucinogens, where the digital image possesses the most profound experience of an alternate universe possible, and our reliance on media for comfort, sedation, and amnesia is complete.

A series of small scale paintings inspired by 8-bit graphics of early video games, animation, the spectacular sublime, and the idea of a primitive digital culture that is now almost a memory.

It seems as a given but must be restated here that: paintings authority is done. Gone is the sense that anything can be said with inarticulate smears, exquisitely rendered flesh, or the masterful conjuring of the illusion of reality. Overwhelmed by a burning desire to conform and for a market for celebrity-art celebrity the search for meaning has been shoved aside for the speaking of nothing about and for the no thing. Featureless expanses of colour and carefully rendered design as painting has become the norm in a society arrested, content to rely on the banal cyclicality of popular culture and its referent in Warhol’s often quoted statement concerning fame, celebrity, and brevity.

Paintings technologies have created a desire for surface and finish that is the antithesis of paintings first murmurings - the barely legible scrawl, the primitive representations of existence, and the shit strewn cave of the pre-literate savant. A mythical year zero where artists, writers, murderers, and priests were all one and the same person scratching an existence under or next to a rock.