trouble in paradise
by Douglas Messerli
Daughter
of Jove, relentless power,
Thou
tamer of the human breast,
Whose
iron scourge and torturing hour
The
bad affraight, afflict the best!
Thomas Gray, Hymn to Adversity
Jim
Morphesis Wounds of Existence,
curated by Peter Selz, Pasadena Museum of California Art, the show opened on
January 24, 2015; I attended a panel discussion with the artist and Jay
Belloli, moderated by Howard Fox on January 25, 2015.
Early
in a discussion with the artist, Jim Morphesis, speaking in a public
conversation about his new exhibition, “Wounds of Existence,” curated by Peter
Selz at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, panelist Jay Belloli asked the
artist how, upon moving to Los Angeles from Philadelphia, his painting was
affected. It appeared that instead of representing a radical shift, Morphesis’
work—so different from most artists who immigrated to the “Golden” State—became
even more moody and troubling in its depiction of religious and Greek
mythology. Morphesis quipped, after also explaining that during the same period
he had been attending the early and troubled years at CalArts (California
Institute of Arts), that “This place [Los Angeles} needed something dark.”
His contrarian point of view reveals
something important about the expressionist-influenced artist, who worked
throughout the early 1980s—a time of rising performance- and
theoretically-based art—in intensely personal abstractions of classical
historical masterworks such as Diego Velázquez (in No Sanctuary, 1981) and Giovanni Bellini (in Destiny, 1982). Indeed, for much of the next decade, until he
returned to New York City late in that decade, the artist continued exploring
elements of Greek mythology in works centered upon Prometheus and Icarus.
Yet upon his return to Los Angeles,
Morphesis once again shifted back to themes of burden, torture, and death in
his stunningly beautiful Marsyas series
of the early millennial years, invoked by the slabs of freshly slaughtered beef
he daily witnessed from a nearby packing plant as well as representing
Morphesis’ recollection of seeing Rembrandt’s atypical painting Carcass of Beef (Le Boeuf corch) in the Louvre. The myth the title eludes to
concerns the Greek satyr whom Apollo flayed alive for the beauty of his song,
suggesting again that art and love ends inevitably in torture and horrible
death; or, to put another way, as the poet Thomas Gray writes in the passage I
quote above, Jove’s daughter Venus (Zeus’ Aphrodite), in taming the human heart,
forces mankind to suffer the “iron scourge and torturing hour.”
In the retrospection of this revelatory
show, we realize that perhaps what Morphesis was attempting to conceal early on
in his artifacts was just this painful interlocution between love and death,
particularly given the inevitable suffering and torturing hours that inevitably
results. Surely it might have been easier to turn his attention to the Pacific
landscape, to dance in the sunset, or query the increasing international
community surrounding him; but those were not directions with this
instinctually committed artist could go. Obviously, the desire to into look
into the face of suffering was already in the artist’s DNA by the time he
arrived in what others described as paradise.
*Actually,
the substance was a kind of home-made concoction of materials: Rhoplex (an
ancrylic binder) was combined with Rutile (a granulated mineral used in ceramic
glazers) and glass micro beads (used for sand-blasting and for reflective
paints) as well as metallic pigments.
**Interestingly,
Morphesis described the doors he remembers from the Orthodox mass as being
closed, when the priests retreated behind the doors.
Los Angeles,
January 27, 2015
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