Wil Murray

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Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio

Text by Jacqueline Mabey, July 2007

Wil Murray makes demanding paintings. The joyful exuberance of his Pop art-influenced color palette stops the viewer in their tracks, insisting they take notice. The layers of paint are legion, painstakingly poured on to the support, cut away in certain sections and reapplied elsewhere, creating a composition that seems cacophonous upon first look. The glossy finish of the paint intensifies this seeming chaos, causing the eyes to search for a stable point of reference. But after the initial shock has passed, the complexity of the work, the ways in which it is simultaneously familiar and peculiar, begins to register.

Murray’s generous and complex works take their place within the so-called return to painting. From the lauded Leipzig school of painters to the record-breaking prices garnered by paintings during auction week in New York to the vauntingly titled Triumph of Painting exhibition at The Saatchi Gallery in London, the medium has undergone a resurgence of popularity in the art world. The embrace of painting, however, has not been limited to Europe and the United States: in Canada, exhibitions such as Paint at the Vancouver Art Gallery, upcoming solo-shows of painters at both the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, along with the work of numerous emerging artists evince this phenomenon.

There are, however, several important ways in which Murray’s work differs from his contemporaries. Murray seriously pursues a non-representational practice that catechizes the history of modern painting in a playful manner, picking up dropped threads and taking them in new and daring directions. An example of this is found in how his work deals with the issue of flatness, perhaps the key problematic for modernist painting since the simultaneous “death” and rebirth of painting with the advent of photography. The manner in which he builds up specific areas of the surface while excavating others represents a daring embrace of and challenge to the two-dimensional nature of the support, creating a sculptural quality without producing illusionistic depth. Connected to formal technique is how Murray’s work takes up the issue of narrative: the story that each painting tells is of its own creation. But the work evades an easy narrative of progression- the tale is not straightforward, not easily told- as the end of one painting is removed and placed in the middle of another, the beginning and subsequent layers of paint is visible in spots and concealed elsewhere. The work of Wil Murray is demanding, in that it makes strange and new what was once familiar, dressing up dissonance in its sublime Sunday best.