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5 Painters Catalog Text
by Erin Sheehan
Wil Murray uses very liquid enamels. When he leaves the studio at night, the paintings continue to paint themselves. When he pushes them around, they push back.
Murray's work traces an intimate engagement with the contingent tendencies of his enamels and documents the implications of their handling. In this sense, his work shows a kinship with that of artists incorporating and advancing abstraction over the last quarter century and beyond. But what can this kind of engagement with the medium afford? In 1946, Robert Motherwell asserted that "The most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the Surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium." Over 50 years later, Ken Carpenter wondered how champions of the New New Painters could detect the pursuit of a legitimate end in their paintings; for him "sometimes the New New give the impression their art is not solidly rooted in life experience but in playing with paint." In the current terms of the debate, it seems that the relationships between process, material, and conceptual value must continue to pose a vexed question.
The works exhibited in 5 Painters intervene in this question through a turn to the medium. The new paintings show continuities with Murray's previous work, most of which were destroyed when his Vancouver studio burned to the ground in the summer of 2003. His intimacy with his materials has grown, however, and the technical explorations he's undertaken in Montreal amount to innovations in the handling of his very liquid, solvent-based enamels. In Do You Think He Can Kiss Me A Hundred Million Times and in Too Busy In the Back Room, Writing Love Songs To You, Murray has subjected the fluid properties of his paint to differential pulls of gravity as a way to solve compositional problems previously addressed through masking techniques. Taken together with Sell All You Have, Give It To The Kittens, a surface whose layered skins are cut and pushed at confident right angles, the paintings articulate colour and form in ways that are at once bolder and more open to the play of paint and gravity than his previous work.
In the face of Murray's process, to draw a distinction between playing with paint and life experience is to impoverish both terms. In Murray's work, he and his paints engage: he pushes them around, they push back. Look long though, look away, and look again. This work hasn't been generated in an inviolate dialogue between an autonomous painter-in-earnest and the essence of his medium. The excess of Murray's engagement with his paint exhausts such tropes, the dichotomies that support them and the dualisms they bolster. Murray's engagement with his paint is immediately inflected and pulled upon by other forces: the gravity that flattens and drags the enamel, the temperature and quality of the air that cures it, the angles at which the boards are laid to cure, the long workday, the after-work drinking and the hangover that delays a scheduled return to a curing surface, a real estate market that encourages a particular approach to property management which affords Murray a space to develop his process and in the same gesture makes possible the destruction of that space, setting fire to the traces of his process.
So what about the possibility of autonomous expression? I dunno. And neither, I suspect, does Murray, whose works in this show attest less to a concern with painting-in-earnest than to a steady, principled and quietly foundational committment to going on-- with paint.
[Ken Carpenter, "What's New?" Art in America, July 1999: 51-53]
[Robert Motherwell, "Beyond the Aesthetic," Design, April 1946: 14-15]
Text by Erin Sheehan
Thank You to Jesse Proudfoot
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