Associating with Undefined What-Have-Yous: Thoughts on Bruce Riley’s Recent Paintings by Matt Morris
http://www.mattmorrisworks.com/info
Multiple heavens are stacked through different time zones and universes, and the soul is split into parts at death, with some pieces going to hell, some to their eternal reward and some go to live in the trees. So recounts the indigenous spiritual beliefs of Indonesian and Philippine cultures. The structure of these mythologies may be approximated in the paintings of Bruce Riley. Layers of watermedia and resin compress whole worlds into deep, churning events. Variously organic, patterned (sometimes condensing in ornamental designs) and loosely figurative, Riley’s paintings play jewel tones against one another into luminous, vivifying complexities. While a painting is traditionally thought to open a window into the wall on which it hangs, these works are portals to someplace(s) altogether plural and pancosmic, where the painter and the viewer can occupy myriad roles (and positions and poses). We can be anyone we want, and there are a million ways to do it, as long as we are freed to flex our imaginations. These paintings testify as much.
My work’s about everything all at once; it’s about a universal thing that I might have access to, a state of being that doesn’t have anything to do with any kind of description. I’m so sorely aware of this humancentric view of how we process information in the world; it just seems like chewing things up a lot. There’s no need for answers. I’m very interested in a process of non-thinking, instead pulling something out of that spiritual ether and letting that guide, because there is a natural, coherent systemizing of life. The whole thing is a quiet watching. 1
In 1921, Hermann Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostik explained the psychiatrist’s technique for testing a patient’s associative responses to the abstract shapes found in a series of inkblots. And while many abstractionists in the proceeding century may eschew the viewer’s impulse to call out wriggling forms and flowing puddles as persons, places and things, Riley’s practice welcomes this engagement.
Rather than calling a thing by its name, these works and their audience are liberated to call a thing whatever they want. The sensuality of the perceptual is the dominant force here, and words (even these words) shudder in ecstasy before a total forfeit to the visual experiences they aim to articulate. A fantasy half formed unfolds: exotic orchids that only bloom once a year, and even then must be coaxed out with song; drag superstar Ru Paul seated in half-lotus at an Ashram; a rainbow struggles with being snared between resinous panes, but blushes and admits he enjoys the fight; a recent sighting of the Loch Ness monster smacking a tray of chutneys; some of the paintings’ flies are open.
As faces form in the paintings, they necessarily acknowledge the Chicago Imagists (associated with the “Hairy Who?” exhibitions that radically departed from conventional representations of figuration in painting), but there’s some sass to their tone. Lolling tongues (or phalluses) stick out in playful disregard, and these members come polka dotted or bejeweled. Riley’s newest works are vivaciously masculine, like stained glass church windows peering into the heart of a man who is all ages at once. He (the artist) is excited, yet withdrawn. His actions in the paintings are obvious insofar that the paintings exist, but he doesn’t rely on the conventions of the artist’s hand or the brush’s stroke. Rather, a new system is in place, where drips, pours, sprays and stains of pigment and medium coalesce into utterly organic forms: as if blown in from a freak storm or plucked from Riley’s garden just outside his studio window in Chicago.
I’m messing with all of that cultural build up, all of that time binding, all the things that we are culturally and individually. I explore it through watching my own organism, using myself as a litmus test for where I look and what I allow myself to be. What I am at any given time is the current content of my consciousness. Since I’ve been watching my consciousness, the paintings have just become beautifully happy. My work, my life, all rolled into one. There are no hours; there’s no time.
Riley’s paintings have taken a turn towards the joyous and mysterious. In the recent Self Portrait (with seven years’ worth of layered painting on its surface), a single ‘figure’ is changed in for a gathering of glowing orbs, looming before a syrupy black field. Disco balls, Buddha hands or droplets of sun: these lemon, lime and spicy red forms overlap into a constellation of undefined what-have-you’s, reassured in their lack of isolation.
1 All quotations are from Bruce Riley and are drawn from an interview with the author at artist’s studio on Sunday, May 9, 2010.