The Tribeca Trib

May 2000
Out of the Flames, Imagery by Jim Murray

By Jeanne C. Wilkinson

This will be the last exhibition in the two-year history of Markham-Murray (formerly Hartnett-Murray) Gallery, which nextseason will become an alternative studio/exhibition space. Gallery director Jim Murray felt it was appropriate at this point to show his won work, especially since hi is closing the gallery primarily to give himself the time to explore and develop his painting. This is a choice any painter understands, as painting is a demanding master—it sets its own timetable and will not be rushed, and if neglected it will nag at one’s soul endlessly. Even those who give up painting for good are never quite free of its strange pull.
The exhibition spans the las6t two years and shows the evolution of Murray’s Painterly ideas and his deep involvement in the issues and complexities of that process. The paintings are abstract and share the idea of transformation, expressed through the artist’s urge to paint layer upon layer, creating a “history” that may or may not be visible with the composition is finished. Many artists, for many reasons (dissatisfaction the most common) rework a painting until its origins are obliterated. This is not what Murray does. He completes a picture, often in painstaking detail and then covers it in part or whole with dissimilar imagery—a process not unlike strata laid down from epoch to epoch, evidence of separate processes and products resulting from separate times and conditions.
In an earlier painting, Upside Blue (1998), there are two distinct paintings on the canvas—the first a complex skein of carefully drawn lines based on the patterns of a woodland copse, the second a storm of thick, sinuous strokes of paint that covers most of the canvas. The upper painting resembles plant-like forms that root and twist, searching for a place to expand, creating a tension between their aggressive power and the span of delicate linear imagery left exposed from the earlier painting underneath.
The thick strokes also look like flames of fire, imagery inspired by the artist’s day job as a fireman. Or perhaps it was Murray’s interest in transformative powers, evident in his paintings that attracted him to firefighting in the first place. Fire takes something solid and real and renders it forever invisible, or altered—a process not unlike what Murray does to his paintings. Perhaps the flame imagery he uses is a symbol for a great metamorphic power underlying all change and transformation.
It could be that Murray’s organic imagery could also be ephemeral, and may disappear from the work as it transforms itself into something else. In Silver #2 He covers the composition with silver paint, effectively freezing all color and movement in the underlying layers, leaving only the texture of the hidden painting to hint at what lies underneath. This process evokes an understanding of how hidden and unknowable the processes of metamorphosis are to even an attentive viewer.
In his latest work Murray separates the layers from each other by making paintings on Plexiglass and placing them in a kind of shadow box that allows the under-strata to be seen behind and through the upper painting. This development is subtly freeing—the lower imagery is transcended rather than lost. But the texture, the history of the work shown in bumps and rivulets of paint on canvas, is no longer evident. The plexiglass pieces reveal more, but they are less overtly sensuous works—some fierce naked intimacy is lost even as the imagery is saved to our sight.
Murray is dealing with issues that are part of the deep language of abstract art—transformation, order and chaos, revelation versus concealment. It will be interesting to see where hi and his art take each other in the future.