Robert Morgan: Lonestar is Given to Love at David Richard Gallery

Robert C. Morgan, Landscape 6, 2023, Acrylic, metallic paints on canvas, 16 x 30 inches. Courtesy of David Richard Gallery.

ROBERT C. MORGAN
Lonestar is Given to Love
David Richard Gallery
April 24 – May 24, 2024
 

By MARK BLOCH, May 15, 2024

The strict horizontal and vertical blocks and columns of color in the debut of Robert Morgan’s “Landscape” series, is supplemented by the similar works from his “Loggia” series facing them and two from his “Distance” cycle on the other two walls. They all conspired in my consciousness to accentuate one very tiny shape--in a 2017 work near the door called Focus 2--that provided the only instance of a diagonal line in this entire front room. Moving into the back space of the gallery, a tall thin T shape pierced a pink field in a work called Roman Stack (2010), stacked indeed, a vertical reminder of a Barnett Newman “zip” painting. But across that room I saw another pink area, this time calling attention to an adjacent elongated diagonal in a hot color as well as a large deep blue U shape. More curves, more diagonals.

Morgan will only reveal that the curious title of his new show is from a poem and that “poetry is what brings us toward one another.” Known to many as an art critic, he is also an artist who has shared his paintings, photographs, performance works, conceptual art, and experimental films for five decades.

I first came in contact with Morgan when he hosted a controversial panel I was on for the Artists Talk on Art series at the Wooster Street Gallery in 1984. Before that he had earned my respect with his gigs at the Franklin Furnace (1976), The Whitney (1976), Artists Space (1976, 1977 and 1985) and later at both the Millennium Film Workshop (1988) and the Anthology Film Archives (1996) for film.

Landscape 8, Acrylic, metallic paints on canvas 2023, 16 x 30 inches. Courtesy of David Richard Gallery

More recently he took his talents to his beloved Eastern hemisphere, showing paintings internationally at the Korean International Art Fair in October 2012, and in Seoul at Able Fine Art and later the Shilla Gallery in 2023. In 2017, a survey exhibition at the Proyectos Montclova in Mexico City featured not only his paintings but photographs of early performances. Finally, in New York in fall 2022, he showed not only at Gallery Artego in Queens but also the Scully Tomasko Foundation where he showed small gestural works from the late 1960s in addition to excerpts from his various series of recent paintings, some of which are represented here.

At first glance, Morgan’s geometric abstractionist paintings look orderly, bordering on rigid. His hard edged work has been mentioned in the same breath as the De Stijl’s Theo Van Doesberg or the Constructivist Lazslo Moholy Nagy—nothing to complain about. But Morgan has a process-driven side as well that, to his credit, it is not always apparent, even a willingness to ad lib when manifesting his compositions. Little imperfections are present but one must look for them. Morgan does not run from anomalies, just repairs them thoughtfully with dabs of color. He has studied calligraphy, hand paints curvilinear shapes with machine-like care, and the motile work in his performances of 70s embraced the expressiveness of actionism and time-based art.

Richard Vine interviewed the artist in a talk at the gallery last week, reminding us that Morgan wrote “the first-ever PhD dissertation on Conceptual art in the U.S. (New York University, 1978).” Yet Morgan sometimes strays from the sketches for these paintings, altering them on the spot.

Robert C Morgan, Focus 2, 2017, Acrylic, metallic paints on canvas 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of David Richard Gallery.

His gallerist David Eichholtz wrote, “He does not create nor adhere to boundaries, which allows him to respond to impulses and whatever interests him.” Thus, Morgan not only employs experience and feelings in his art but the thinker and communicator is resolute that experience and feelings be part of the viewers experience of his art, too—and all art.

His first solo exhibition with the gallery includes 19 paintings on an intimate scale, with the smallest at 8.5 inches square up to the largest, just under 2 feet square. The new work here, his Landscape series, is acrylic on canvas, horizontal in format, and employs the metallic paint he has featured in other recent series.

Morgan’s embrace of materials and the visual realm are essential. After making no art in the 1990s, a systematic and serial seriality followed, with examples of each present. In 2011-12 he created the “Light Streak” works, represented here by a very linear and horizontal piece offset by a single metallic square. Two canvasses from his  2012-3 “Distance (Takemitsu)” series create a lack of balance and an equilibrium respectively. From 2015-18 a third grouping appeared, the aforementioned “Focus,” utilizing curves before his Loggia paintings took center stage in 2019.

Robert C Morgan, Focus, 2015, Acrylic, metallic paints on canvas 26 x 24 inches. Courtesy of David Richard Gallery.

Upon entering, the Loggia works share a room with the five new Landscape paintings— four of the former face off with five of the latter, with the Loggia tones just slightly more subdued. In both series absorbent near-blacks, ultramarine blue underpainting and dark earth tones eat all available light while the reflective silvers, coppers and golds pop themselves into perceptions of foregrounded shapes.

A preponderance of vertical rectangles spanning from canvas tops to bottoms also advance or fall back depending on their proximity to the metallic paints that were always very much catching this viewers eye, with the near-matte surfaces of mixtures with ultramarine blue providing spatial depth.

Robert C Morgan, Distance 3 (Takemitsu), 2013, Acrylic, metallic paints on canvas 14 x 18 inches. Courtesy of David Richard Gallery.

Though the format is horizontal in his newest hard-edged strategies, don’t expect horizon lines or traditional vistas. The metallic paints advance vertically and concentrically out of the dark browns and blues, framing geometry and painting as the subject matter in ways that would have made Morgan‘s teacher and colleague Clement Greenberg proud, as discussed with Vine in their gallery talk.

The mysterious result is that once immersed in the contexts of these works viewers cannot link an eye to a “proper” scale or a place in a hierarchy of depth other than the binary choice of close vs. far.

In this way, viewers becomes participants in the work. In addition to Greenberg, meeting Robert Motherwell and heeding his words and advice was instrumental to Morgan’s art-making and his understanding of art history, theory, and teaching. So Morgan stayed focused on his studio practice and writing and taught art history rather than art making.

Robert C Morgan, Loggia XVIII, 2019, Acrylic, metallic paints on canvas 22 x 22" inches. Courtesy of David Richard Gallery.

Morgan embraces the art of Asia in the scope as well as the detail of his work. He seems to seek the greatest possible difference between yin and yang, pushing the two opposites apart in order to paradoxically unite them in a third mental and emotional space.

Morgan’s wife, the art historian Soojung Hyun, reminded us during the Vine interview in the gallery that the Loggia series is named for the Italian architecture term referring to those cool, covered 17th century exterior corridors one can walk through in Rome and Bologna, in which a partial outer wall is supported by a series of columns or arches, open to the elements. The result is not only refreshing breezes but shapes and forms half lit by natural light with others pushed into shadows because the entire experience takes place half indoors, half out. Open on one or more sides, an arithmetic mean or middle ground emerges within these transitory spaces and I’m gathering this ethereal realm is where Morgan wants to take us, neither yin nor yang but both at once, a mysterious place we share.

Lonestar is Given to Love is Morgan’s first solo exhibition with David Richard Gallery who moved from Harlem to their current Chelsea location in 2017. They have been showing Post-War abstraction in the US for many years. WM