Wil Murray Artist Statements

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Wil Murray makes dripping, tumescent, over-stimulated paintings that horrify the individual away, toward a communal adoration of painting’s photographic portraits. « But this printed, shared and slutty photographic flatness, » he writes, «bores as quickly as it is consumed, and once desirous of girth, weight and threat, the individual is drawn, alone, back to the painting-object - calm after sharing a banal seduction/consumption narrative with a photograph, but privately haunted by this pornographic likeness - to be horrified, delighted and titillated again ».

Murray’s paintings describe his own queezy seduction by ghosts and announce his own arrival as a spectral seducer. He describes being haunted by photographs of his paintings much as one would be by a portrait of a lover or a former self : « I am captivated, gazing as if I could see around or past the subject, into its hands or mouth, or into shadows. Or maybe just a little further up its leg, down its blouse. Into a privately known place that the portrait will not show. What was past my eyes. What turned me on and sent me to the photo in the first place ».

Like viewing a a landscape with a Claude glass, his work sends the viewer back and forth between their own fleshy eyes, and mechanical surrogates.