Simon Morley

Song Art Gallery, Simon Morley “SOME BOOKS” exhibition, installation view, 2023

All the works in this exhibition were made in Korea, where I have lived since 2010. They come from three on-going series. The ‘Book-Paintings’ are based on covers or title pages of real books which I hand paint in acrylic on rectangular canvases. These works consist of two simple physical properties: a geometric field of colour and a subtle variation in textures. Unlike in the original sources, the text is painted almost the same colour as the ground and is built up in painted layers to produce a relief effect. Another series in the exhibition are works on paper: the ‘Paragraph-Painting’ series. Here, I paint directly onto book or magazine pages, covering over paragraphs or verses of text or images with geometric areas of flat colour which are the shape and size of the printed area they conceal.

Song Art Gallery, Simon Morley “SOME BOOKS” exhibition, installation view, 2023

In this exhibition, the ‘Book-Paintings’ are selected from works celebrating great Western thinkers and writers of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the poets T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the writer Albert Camus. A triptych of gold ‘Book-Paintings’ evokes the Western humanist tradition from which these thinkers and writers come. In the ’Paragraph-Paintings’ the pages have been torn from the British Film Review for the year 1948 and conceal photographs of movie stars of the era.

Simon Morley, Camus. ‘La-Peste'(1947), 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 53 x 41 cm

There is basic aesthetic pleasure in looking at simple juxtaposed geometric areas of colour, but in my work this pleasure is complicated by the awareness that a text or image has been erased in the case of the ‘Paragraph-Paintings’, and that what at first looks like a field of colour contains text derived from a book cover of title page in the ‘Book-Paintings’. In both series, the colours of the paintings may relate to the actual colours of the sources, or they may be prompted by a mood I associate with the source, or derived from the specific season of the year and the place where I painted the work, or simply arrived at intuitively.

Song Art Gallery, Simon Morley “SOME BOOKS” exhibition, installation view, 2023

Thirdly, in the exhibition are examples from my ‘Natural History Painting’ series. Plants and rocks are sourced from around where I live near the DMZ and arranged to spell words, then copied in watercolours, life-size, in trompe l’oeil illusionistic style. In this exhibition, the three paintings spell the same word: UTOPIA. This may or may not be an ironic reference to the nation on the other side of the DMZ.

Simon Morley. Munsan, Paju-Si, November 2023.

Song Art Gallery, Simon Morley “SOME BOOKS” exhibition, installation view, 2023

Song Art Gallery
B133 Acrovista Arcade, 188, Seochojungang-ro, Seocho-gu, Seoul
02-3482-7096

WEB     INSTAGRAM