CATHERINE MURPHY
Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.
514 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
212 941 0012
February 9, 2005 - Saturday, March 19, 2005
By VICKY PERRY
Catherine Murphy Chair 2003
oil on canvas, 46 x 48
inches
Courtesy Lennon, Weinberg Inc
If artistic ideas build one on another into a type of progress, Catherine Murphy has made realism work harder and do more. Like Idelle Weber, Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Alex Katz, Murphy's realism successfully integrates the ideas of abstraction and representation. Murphy's paintings seamlessly incorporate the intimate details of her life with the major aesthetic dramas of our day.
To paint realistically in the face of our ever-present photographic technology implies the conscious decision to enact a performance. Unlike strategies used recently by Damien Hirst (whose realist paintings are crafted by anonymous others), Murphy's practice declares that her life can be mediated through her body, her nervous system and her hand. Murphy seems to have a hunger for ownership of her vision - an ownership accomplished through deliberate study. She has said. "The reason I paint is because I want to be part of the world and I don't know how else to do it".
Oil paint and graphite drawings clearly display decades of applied concentration with special skill in handling subtle tonal variations. The technique Murphy employs is precise without calling attention to itself. The innovations that Murphy would offer are along the lines of subject matter and precisely composed pictorial space. The rigor of these spatial interests result in starkly different works within her œuvre. Murphy is comfortable painting close-range textures in centrally organized compositions, as in "The Back of Her Head" (almost the back-side of a Chuck Close work). Then she makes a facile leap to painting flat spaces stretching off at an angle, as in "Red Pages", a work that Macolm Morley could have conceived. Murphy can hardly contain her pleasure in solving geometrically theatrical constructions.
Pictorial space undergoes great stress in her hands. Extremes of distance and close-up (all in sharp focus) are placed so close as to almost overlap or create illusionistic puzzles. In "Chair", two nudes run in a sliver of distance occupying part of a nylon-webbed grid; the space in this work is under severe mental pressure to to make room for a narrative element. The emotional density of the painting varies across the surface from cool to boiling.
The world she chooses to show is quiet, almost minimal in interest; a texture, a change in light across a wall. However, unlike the attractions of fully abstract minimalist objecthood, Murphy's subjects - her iconography - is suffused with human attention even before we view it. While the minimal object is achingly inviting to touch, Murphy shows us snippets of a zen-like reality that are delectable but have a distance from us - are unreachable - for having been mediated by her illusionistic feats.
Her stories are covert to the point of disappearing. Action is only implied. But always we feel we are in the middle of an epiphany. The sharp focus and intimacy and even inconsequential subject bring to mind those special moments when the world becomes crystal-clear. The scrupulous portrait of an unspectacular, throw-away hole "Under the Snow" becomes a chorus that dispels doubt.
An autobiographical element runs through the work, for example the tender drawing of her "Paint Jacket Pockets" or the painting of her photograph, "Slipped Self". Unlike the expressionism of Eric Fischl, Murphy's drama is her devoted, insanely slavish practice. She must love what she paints.
The inclusion of these personal elements might be expected to reduce the general appeal of the work, making it almost self-involved. This is not the case. Murphy's handling of the specific is so honest, it seems to elicit thoughts of our own simple vulnerabilities. Murphy offers the insight that all formalism is inseparable from the personal. We cannot honestly create except from the position of being deeply subjective.
