Book Paintings
Galerie Scrawitch, Paris 4 – 27 September, 2014
‘Je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.’
L’Etranger
As is usual with my exhibitions I tried to find a connection between me and the place. In this instance, as it was Paris it wasn’t so difficult. The starting-point for the project was the prospect of my first solo exhibition in the city where I lived for two years just after finishing university, when I was setting out to turn myself into an artist, having recently finished studying Modern History. It immediately struck me that Camus should be my subject. He’d made a great impression on me at an impressionable age, when I read everything I could get my hands on in translation. I was a very belated ‘existentialist’. I remember joining the Existentialist Discussion Group in my first year at Oxford and feeling rather intimidated, until I made a good impression on my fellow ‘existentialists’ by saying that contrary to their opinion I thought Camus was in the end an optimist, in that he so lyrically celebrates the experience of the climate and nature of his native Algeria. I also performed in a dramatized version of ‘L’Etranger’, or ‘The Outsider’ as its called in the UK world (it’s ‘The Stranger” in the USA). No, I wasn’t Meursault. I was his lawyer. The guy who played Meursault was pretty good, I thought. I have no idea what became of him.
And now, after a very long time, I revisited Camus, and have been reading him in French. My works pay homage not only to the author but also to the publisher, Gallimard, for whom Camus worked as an editor. The beautiful typography of the NRF series made painting my Book-Paintings a real pleasure. I’ve also made a series of rubbings of places where Camus lived and worked in Paris, including the door-plaque chez Gallimard in the Quartier Latin. It’s a kind of ‘in the footsteps…’ work. Between these two series were other attempts to catch something of what Camus means to me.
You can view the video ‘Nous tous, parmi les ruines’ by searching for ‘Simon Morley on Vimeo.
