![\""A](\"http:\/\/s191243.instanturl.net\/keithmorrison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/tunisia.jpg\")
<\/a>“A Night in Tunisia”
oil on canvas
60 X 68″
1991<\/p><\/div>\n
To externalize the dreaming process is one of the noblest and most seldom fulfilled possibilities of contemporary painting. We get rare, exciting glimpses of it in the work of Keith Morrison at Bomani Gallery.<\/p>\n
Morrison, who is dean of the college of Creative Arts at dean Francisco State University, was born in Jamaica in 1942, but has lived in the United sates for many years and has travelled extensively.<\/p>\n
His paintings are improvised images that reel between memory and fantasy, travelogue and rebus, borrowed and private symbols, References abound to the landscape and culture of the Caribbean, Africa and urban America<\/p>\n
Many painters attempt the sort of free association Morrison practices, but of all modes of pictorial expression it may be the most difficult to sustain. Even Morrison\u2019s wok can collapse into slapstick, as in \u201cRed Sea \u201c (1995) or the didactic staginess of Cybercity\u201d (1994).<\/p>\n
Mind-Stopping Images<\/p>\n
But when he keeps the difficult balance of not knowing what to do and doing it anyway, as in \u201cA Night in Tunisia\u201d and the dazzling \u201cCrabs in a Pot\u201d (1994) his images can stop the mind in its tracks.<\/p>\n
To my eye, Morrison\u2019s touch with paint is almost too relaxed, but if that looseness is the price of freedom he feels to deploy color, then to fault him for it would be eaviling.<\/p>\n
His touch proves itself, though, in his manipulation of space. As in a dream, the objects and settings in his pictures seem to change dimensions with the intensity of your attention to them.<\/p>\n
Focus on the background still-life objects in \u201cA Night in Tunisia,\u201d quiver with narrative insinuations, and the curved profile near the top of the picture feels like looming mountains. Only when you switch focus to those lavender-mottled curves do they show themselves to be the silhouette of a bass resting sideways atop the grand piano that forms the composition\u2019s ground plane.<\/p>\n
The elastic space of Morrison\u2019s paintings cuts a middle path between the tormented spatial distortions of Max Beckmann\u2019s allegorical pictures and the loopy reveries of Robert Colescott.<\/p>\n