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Cole Morgan... finds eloquence in the most banal minutiae which he then fashions into wildly incongruous cross-cultural associations.
In the vernacular of Morgan’s canvases, triangles, pyramids and balls happily co-exist with Zulu shields, planets and dervishes. Not that he sets out to plan these things. he speaks of being taken by these objects, adding that when I’m done exploring them, a new one presents itself.
Cole Morgan’s self-contained, abstract paintings confront our perceptions of reality. It is as if he’s sending us a message: If we look beyond accepted notions of form and function, we might discover a parallel reality amidst the familiar.
Morgan’s primary goal is to direct, but never to guide us through constant discovery in his paintings. The tools he employs to conduct our eye are as likely to be drawn from classical principles of painting as from the vernacular of the mundane.
The cross element or triangle construction, a style derived from 17th-century religious tableaux of the Holy Trinity, provides spatial division in his compositions as he re-configures shapes and objects to a new purpose. But if Morgan ascribes to any religion, it would be the one of Order, in which composition is distilled to its barest minimum, where shapes, textures and colors are refined and concentrated to their most visually descriptive elements.
Every square millimeter of canvas is controlled.
For anyone in search of meaning, Morgan’s obscure notes to himself and primal scratchings are fool’s gold, since value is wholly subjective. Indeed, meaning is an afterthought, because in spite of all the tease, all the titillation of controlled form and classic proportions to direct our gaze, the tour on which this artist takes us is nothing but an elaborate ruse designed to free our imagination.
All the self-important scribbles are just that, and meaning lies, as it did for the Dadaists, only in what we make of Morgan’s clues to the trail of our subconscious.
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1950 Born New York , USA. Currently works/lives Antwerp Belgium
CONDITION: Three Black quarter inch boards divide this book into two volumes. 240 pages, published 2004 - quite rare! Mild wear to boards.
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