Jesse Morsberger

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Paradigm Shift a solo exhibition by LA-based artist Jesse Morsberger.

In these new works, Morsberger’s signature insights to the world of video games—at once playful, sensitive, and provocative—now focus upon the figures and landscapes of two iconic franchises: Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda.

The paintings in Paradigm Shift are journeys. In “Lost Woods,” Link, Zelda’s stoic hero, stares from the foreground’s dim sylvan light to an ally leaned against an ancient tree; this leaning tree guides us deeper into the forest, to a sacred grove; in the grove, at a pool of cool, clear water, a horse lowers its head to drink. Like aZelda game itself, the beguilingly-tranquil composition of “Lost Woods” brims with a restless, narrative energy, pulling us forward to a new and wondrous place.

This sense of movement vaults us beyond the tepid voyeurism of nostalgia in favor of something truly transportive. Morsberger’s paintings don’t ask us to look back on lost times; instead, they compel us, almost before we notice, to the intrinsically active spirit of games, of play itself, a state in which we are always, again and again, sincerely beginning.

And these beginnings, fittingly, land us in medias res.

A hero of Final Fantasy grapples a red lion, laboring like Heracles (“Red XIII”). A youthful Link hangs aloft, on a leaf parachute, a mere moment from setting upon on a warm stonebank, while his demi-human friend flies behind over a blue river (“Deku Leaf”). In “Hero’s Atonement,” perched on an older Link’s arm, is a talking owl. The owl points the way forward, commanding. Metamorphosis, motion, and a pervasive animism reveal the mythic power of these subjects, a quality so often overlooked in the culture of gaming. In the modernity of video games, Morsberger has excavated an ancient, timeless pulse.

This kinetic force in Morsberger’s paintings springs, in large part, from his startling visual language. We are whisked from where we began by myriad formal transitions. Deftly-painted figures stand against gestural, abstracting mountains and clouds. Color values travel from the arcing cave mouth of “Lakeside Shrine,” all warm and torchlit rock, into glittering blue shallows, emerald deeps, and a searing, azure sky. Refusing to settle, as do their character subjects, these paintings draw us into moments of pure immersion.

Each painting is vibrantly alive, aware of that existential delight of the sort of imaginative moments many of us may have long since left behind, of jumping into the guise of someone else. In Morsberger’s work, as we fall into new, heroic avatars, we enter a transitional space: a Paradigm Shift in the way we think about games, paintings, and what happens to us when we lose ourselves entering into them.

Jesse Morsberger b. 1994 in Brooklyn, NY, now lives and works in LA, California. He studied at SUNY Purchase College, receiving his BFA in 2016. His first solo show will be with Taymour Grahne Projects (online) having previously exhibited in group exhibitions at Nicodim Gallery (NY), Kravets Wehby Gallery (NY) and Milk Gallery (NY). Morsberger was awarded the fellowship and residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2020.

—Riley Bingham