Adopting a celebratory approach to colour and form, Jeremy Morgan explores how the worlds of design, technology, and the artisan can combine with analogue painting to create new, hybrid structures. The resulting works aim to address the instability, the contradiction and ultimately the potential of the contemporary world.

Work is often built from spliced together carpentry off-cuts, the arbitrary dimensions of these inherited materials suggesting both compositional starting points and structural restrictions to be flexed against, whilst minimizing resource usage.

Morgan’s abstract paintings retain a toehold in the real world – geometric elements often appear to adhere to the familiar rules of physics – dots roll down slopes or perch on platforms, rectangles are precariously stacked against their neighbours. In this way a physical space is seemingly described, and the reading is shifted from pure abstraction towards something with a sense of narrative, as if a sequence of events is being recorded. 

Though Morgan’s work often incorporates a restless sense of instability within it, suggestive of a dissolution, his aim is to retain ambiguity around specific readings. The works might just as easily be describing a chaotic yet playful event, perhaps kindred to slapstick comedy or circus acrobatics, as they do a techno-blip or a collapsed architectural form. In incorporating an element of the ‘unanswered’, Morgan aims to keep his work alive to multiple readings, and to extend implications outwards beyond physical parameters.

In recent work, paint is applied in a series of translucent layers on plywood off-cuts, creating secondary and tertiary colours and forms in the overlaps where the base structure is spliced and out of alignment with the painted layer. The resulting paintings are warmed by the natural wood grain beneath the translucent surface – tipping points between resolution and dissolution which reflect something of both the jeopardy and the hope of our world.

Jeremy Morgan was born in Barnet in 1967, studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and is now based in Oxford where he works as visual designer and artist. During the Covid lockdowns he founded EPOX – an online meeting place for contemporary painters which held regular artist talks and discussions.

Recent solo exhibitions include Tipping Point at Darl-e and the Bear, Woodstock (2022), and Resolution Dissolution at Saturation Point Project Space, London (2022).

Jeremy also writes about contemporary art and is a contributor to Saturation Point, the curatorial project for UK-based systems and non-objective artists: 'Less Wrong' - a review of work by Richard Graville and 'Small World' – a review of Trevor Sutton's show at Zuleika Gallery.