Simon Morley

Monograph

The exhibition of 10 paintings, all 40 x 30 cm, were a selection made by Tatsuya Taguchi, the director of Taguchi Fine Art, Tokyo, of twelve Old and Modern Master's monographs published between 1930 and 1970 from an initial 'long list' supplied by me. This represents the official art historical canon – and a specific art historical gestalt. The chosen artists were those that seemed appropriate to Tatsuya, when seen from within what he understands as the specific cultural parameters of Japan. Also, as usual, I selected books designed and published between certain dates, thereby implicating the artists within a specific time-frame via typography and design. But in this series I removed textual references to author and publisher, leaving only the names of the artists and the image. This distances the paintings from too parasitic a relationship to their sources, and also from the 'appropriation discourse' of postmodernism (within which they would be read predominantly as appropriations of books), hopefully making them more independent in terms of potential meanings, and less reliant on such an intertextual paradigm.

I felt this allowed for the affects of visual indistinctness to play a greater role. Furthermore, by working with book covers that contain images, I focused to a greater extent on the manipulation of images, on what happens when a picture is reduced to low spatial frequencies, and when the relationship of textured 'figure' to flat 'ground' is confused. I felt this reduction served to emphasise the kind of complementarity between text and image that is central to East Asian thought. I also experimented with surface facture, drawing more fully on haptic vision by building up surfaces into higher variations of terrain. I began to recognise more fully that this represents an altogether different kind of negotiation of space to that generated by optical foveal vision. But I was surprised how much recognitional data is still available even when a reproduction of a painting in poor quality digital image is further degraded through being turned into the basic interaction of light and dark, of two-tone shape. I also included a video, 'La Pitture del Trecento' I submerged illustrations from a book on Italian art under a hazy, indistinct veil.