Katy Moran: How to paint like an athlete

No one really wants to paint like an athlete, unless by painting Katy Moran means something like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. Lots of people would like to paint like Moran, but precious few have the wherewithal. The seventeen works here, mostly—following her signature modus operandi—acrylics on found painting, constitute an affirmation of abstract painting, a genre many consider outmoded. How utterly wrong she proves them!

Her repurposing of the found paintings she accumulates like some curator for a museum of banalities constitutes an aesthetic statement. Artists as diverse as Asger Jorn and Julian Schnabel have painted over found art, so it is a standard item in the artistic toolbox. But it is how Moran reworks this topos that matters, not that she follows a traditional recipe. Moran evinces no desire to redeem kitsch by means of parody, has no intentions of a satirical nature: the found works are merely surfaces for her. Perhaps the title of a forgotten collection of tales by Rudyard Kipling, Limits and Renewals (1932), can shed some light on Moran’s mindset. By reusing these canvases and their equally tacky frames, Moran embraces limits. She paints over not only the canvas but also incorporates the frame into the work by extending the paint over it, so her acceptance of these modestly sized points of departure is for her the inauguration of a renewal: she will remake them in her own image but within prescribed margins.

That there is a will-to-power here is undeniable, but this should not be taken as aggression. Moran takes control of structures given her by chance or fate and uses them to invent her own artistic identity. And that energy expresses itself in two ways: tranquility and chaos. Within the show, there is a group of five paintings (all works 2023) and all with the same title: you be your nature, I’ll be mine. An enigmatic fragment from an argument, perhaps with someone else, perhaps with herself, perhaps with the found painting she was in the act of canceling. But the self-other dichotomy marks a moment of self-affirmation, itself, as we see in you be your nature, I’ll be mine 2. First, the frame: it no longer houses triviality but is now transformed into Moran’s structuring of her artistic circumstance. Then the actual painting, which divides clearly into two halves. On the viewer’s left, a vertical flow that threatens to drip off the frame, a medley in fact of blues and a species of ocher. On the right, a swirl, a maelstrom of paint with some faintly geometric figures in the lower right. This clash provides the drama, the bipolar nature of Moran’s work.

The technique defines the five-work series, most especially in number 3, where the right half of the canvas is a block of the blue Moran so often deploys and the left a chaotic mass of shapes and colors. Where the series swerves in a different direction is number 4, not an acrylic on a found painting but an unframed acrylic on canvas, 55 × 23 inches. The emphasis on verticality here is significant, and the piece stands out as an anomaly in a show dominated by horizontal rectangles. It may be a prophetic work, announcing Moran’s move in a different, more unfettered direction.

Certain words recur in the titles of Moran’s other paintings: circus and De Nimes. The idea of the three-ring circus reinforces the idea of these works as controlled chaos. The two Circus town nowhere paintings, both superimposed on found works, fuse Moran’s self-contradictory images: many things happen simultaneously when the circus is in town—or in Moran’s mind—but they are contained within her imaginary town (nowhere, utopia’s etymological meaning) and the frames encasing the two paintings. So, her work is always about the tensions within her imagination between control and frenzied passion, captured in these two paintings with frames within frames surrounding chaos.

What the reference to the French city of Nîmes means for Moran is anyone’s guess, but the ancient and currently lived-in town reflects Moran’s practice of reusing old paintings still in their frames. Whatever her reasons for mentioning Nîmes may be, the result is one of the great paintings in the show: De Nimes, the living room series (circus town nowhere) (2023). A field of Moran’s ubiquitous blue, with turbulent masses of paint on the right and left extremes. At the center, a diminutive square—perhaps a reference to the famous Maison Carrée in Nîmes—the idea that chaos and order can coexist, as long as Katy Moran holds the reins to both horses.