Luke Morrison

“...My art is full of bitter compassion for all those who deceive themselves; but this compassion cannot fail to be followed by the ferocious derision of destiny which condemns man to deception”

—Pirandello

For the fifth iteration of Prelude, Swivel Gallery is pleased to present a series of intimate paintings by Luke Morrison. By scrupulously isolating minimal details of the mundane in his acrylic vignettes, Morrison encourages an attentive exercise of seeing rather than looking, dwelling deeper in the existential meaning of each moment.

Experimenting with scale and the ordinary, Morrison captures the essence of minute details surrounding our daily experience of the world, revealing them as part of a broader system. Reducing its figuration at its minimal terms, the artist is able to oppose today's hyper proliferation of images and produces a stark chiaroscuro synthesis of the reality. Reduced into few chromatic blocks, tones predominate the shapes, and societal roles over individualities.

Morrison’s art reminds us of the profound analysis on the structure of reality operated by artists such as Giorgio Morandi or Paul Cézanne, while engaging with a social realism of simplified color contrasts akin to Milton Avery. Like them, Morrison operates a deep spatial reasoning, analyzing how the act of perceiving and experiencing entities in space varies from different perspectives and distances, eventually affecting their reading.

However, the artist delves deeper, questioning the relations between this space, the subject and the viewer, and turning his painting into an analysis of social structures. The most ordinary object and the minimal vicissitudes in the public space are informed with a different psychological intensity as the artist unveils their emotional and social implications within some kind of ever-looming invisible machine of commodification and consumption of experiences.

Compressing the essence of the social play in the painterly frames of a drama, Morrison’s critique of today's public life and the decline of American deindustrialization maintains some Pirandellian humor towards this comedy of life, or paradoxical playset. Anonymous characters move as puppets, as strangers to one another, with the exception of fleeting interactions within a single frame but never in between, and seemingly unaware of the socio-political and socioeconomic drama they’re part of. A lonely experience of the public space, where most of their free “choices” have been already dictated or influenced by a machine which sustains the priorities and hierarchies around work, identity, class, etc.

At the same time, Morrison’s use of muted grays and brown tones fills the canvas with the unease and unexpectedness of the American suburban experience, in works resonating with what Pirandello once commented: “I think that life is a very sad piece of buffoonery; because we have in ourselves, without being able to know why, wherefore or whence, the need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality (one for each and never the same for all), which from time to time is discovered to be vain and illusory”.

Often choosing nocturnal or crepuscular suspended atmosphere, Morrison’s scenes eventually succeed to reach a balance between information and imagination, allowing the paintings to transcend a direct material reality, to a metaphysical universe where the rule of time and space can be interrupted, and fantasies can also still be permitted. This results in a powerful meditation, which suggests a possible escape in a conscious acceptance of this reality, but also mindful intimate and private resistance, where one can still cultivate a critical reading and perception of the world. Within the regularity of his intimate small cases canvases, Morrison is therefore able to encapsulate the quest of an existential meaning, starting from thinking, looking and moving to re-imagine one's everyday public life from this space of inner resistance.

Prelude an innovative series of capsule projects at 396 Johnson Avenue.

This initiative is designed to provide a first encounter with the practice of an artist on the gallery’s horizon. The core of this concept revolves around an intimate presentation to introduce a deeper dive in a future exhibition: in our viewing room, a chosen artist will take the stage alongside our duo of full-scale exhibitions. Serving as a point of introduction, this compact yet impactful display will allow viewers to create first impressions of the gallery’s new talents, establishing the thematic essence of our upcoming collaboration.