Like many of the formidable abstract painters of the New York School, Kathleen Morris uses house-painter brushes and pastry cutters as a way to manipulate her pigments – to encrust her surfaces with an archaeology of diffuse painterly signs wherein resides the “deep structure” of her artistic language. These paintings are alive with synaptical charges of paint and “accidental” encounters with form that reverberate from mind to body and from body to canvas.

In the best sense, to be a painter in the twenty-first century is to engage in thought in a material way – a physical way – on a highly intuitive level. For the most part, the heads simply emerge in the process of painting. There is nothing ostentatious, overdetermined, or exclusively rational in her style of representation. Instead, the work proceeds on the basis of a nearly unconscious desire. Her paintings oscillate between image and surface, eye and pigment – reminiscent, perhaps, of the psychic automatist approach of the early Surrealists.

Morris talks about the “primitive need” of her body to make gestures and the “metaphysical aspect of time and space” that she believes is inscribed in these works. At the same time, she wants “to get beyond the physical” which means to get beyond the literal aspect of representation in order to move, with Aristotle, into the realm of the metaphysical. She likes “big gestures” because they help to alleviate the burden of obsessive detail and thereby to offer a more generalized account of human existence through her vivid anthropomorphic imagination. Morris wants to give us a lingering, pulsating representation of the soul, purloined from the oblique reservoir of memory. This is the human condition that she so carefully observes in gathering the raw material for her work.

The notion that art is still capable of uttering feeling of any kind has become, in many instances, an alien attribute in recent art. This made apparent over and over again by the enormous glut of abject work repeatedly shown in the various Biennials of recent years. The paintings of Kathleen Morris function in a different way, on another level; and – one would hope – in a more optimistic manner. Her images are about feelings, not concepts. Morris delivers a message that is conscious of the signifying power of the image. Herein lies the tension that evokes beauty – the repository of signs broken to pieces by the sheer will of creative indulgence.