On, and On: Igor Moritz

 

Cob Gallery is proud to present On, and On, an exhibition of eight new works in oil by Igor Moritz. Twilit visions of nocturnal dreamworlds on the cusp of wakefulness, Moritz’s images are the bearers of obscurely emotive meanings whose formal contours are powerfully affecting, even when the precise significance of their contents remains just out of reach. More interested by the structure and shape of sign-systems than the conclusiveness of what they might signify, Moritz creates equivocal spaces where internal and external realities seep into one another, leaving trails of meaning that refuse to lead us to any single destination. His compositions are peopled by pensive, often masked figures positioned in cryptic choreographies: brooding subjects often placed at the edge of their frames or taking up oblique positions within them, themselves framing planes of densely woven space or interacting with objects of opaque symbolic relevance. 

 

Working from life directly onto linen, without preparatory sketches, Moritz’s ‘archaeological’ method involves prolonged periods of gestation. Layers of oil pigment are repeatedly applied to and removed from the painted surface, which is chosen for its tactility and durability. The working process itself becomes the discovery of the final composition, whose forms emerge from the shadows of earlier – often quite different – incarnations. What begin as real scenes are slowly invested with alignments and conjunctions that have the timbre of something transcending reality. The final expressions resonate with the echoes of other possible worlds, whose traces of which remain faintly legible within the images we see. Sharp lines gouged into the painted surface recall the distinctive texture of Moritz’s celebrated pencil works, often collapsing any straightforward distinction between foreground and background, and responding to an intuitive logic poised between the pictorial and the representational. 

 

Sometimes saturated by particular tones, sometimes fizzing with unexpected combinations of colour, the images in this group each convey their own individual atmospherics. Yet they share the sense of a turbulent darkness looming beyond the edge of the frame. Moritz aims not to quell that anxiety, but to test its formal limits, balancing an awareness of what is impending into the visual field with a sense of the image’s irreducible insularity. Paintings like ‘There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT’ take this interest in a distinctive new direction, experimenting with a technique known as ‘topological equivalence’: like a world map, the image connects up with itself around its horizontal and vertical axes. The painting is therefore sealed off with an egglike wholeness that points towards two and three dimensions at the same time. Added to this, in an apparently contradictory gesture, it depicts something that appears to resemble the structural interior of a wall. The moment of tension between spaces and dimensions – looking around and looking through – offers the possibility of new conjunctions between depth and surface, speaking to Moritz’s wider articulation of novel alignments of thought, feeling and expression across this selection of work.