Deborah Schamoni

Aileen Murphy presents Wormhole, her first solo exhibition in Palma de Mallorca, curated by Cristina Anglada for the Cabinet space at Galeria Pelaires.

In the field of physics, a wormhole (also known as Einstein-Rosen bridge) is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime by means of a throat through which matter could travel from one end to the other.

Space, time, surface, matter and the universe are topics that Aileen explores in her paintings, mainly through color and the gestural application thereof. The oil paintings brought together for this show could function as gates through which to enter and witness scenes that occur in different spatial and temporal locations. The possible subject dilutes in a myriad of flashes that suggest memories, dream images or fragments of a sensory experience. Color becomes matter, embodying cavernous tunnels, toboggan legs, sketched landscapes, gaps and anatomical contortions. Pieces in which the background and the figure merge at a certain temperature and degree of humidity. Reality melts into shreds of color.

Aileen Murphy (1984) is an Irish artist based in Berlin, and who has developed an exuberant and audacious approach over the years. She embraces intensity as a driver of action, and her studio experiments seem to model a complex euphoria. The way she uses color is energetic and seemingly chaotic and loud. Prussian blue, radiant lemon, vermilion red, dioxazine purple, manganese blue, warm grey, Persian rose or titanium white create their own choreography on each canvas. They splash, sound, taste and smell. Color acts as a vehicle that has a story that it carries wide open on its shoulders. A vocabulary of its own that offers diverse interpretations, from the mythology of its origins to its physicality, its emotional or psychological story, or the relationship with the senses and its sensuality.

Aileen Murphy graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (2007) and then studied under Amy Sillman and Monika Baer at Städelschule Frankfurt (2018). Murphy stands up for awkwardness, understood as a lack of fitting in with the world. The body, that shell in which we remain trapped, which pirouettes to avoid the gravity that draws us hopelessly to the ground and tries to maintain its balance while fleeing from the signs of time, plays a major role in a large part of her paintings. Her works make us perceive our own corporeality as the product of a daily comedy taking place in this world that is presented to us as digitalized, delocalized and ethereal, just the opposite of the paintings in front of us: they evoke that uncontrolled, ridiculous jumble that we call “the body”, which simultaneously works as an exquisite, extravagant device of perception.

In Aileen's canvases, color blushes and dispels the possible plot, which seems to be playing hide-and-seek. Forms mingle in an interesting manner. The open mouth is transformed into a messy, weightless still life of fruit, where bananas frame figs, apples and strawberries; a headless, garlanded-shape human figure holds a sun against a twilight background; another canvas invites us into the undulating pinkish bowels of a body's interior. Beyond the likely figures, we glimpse lines, spaces, pirouettes and winks. The entire orography of the body is exposed with the nakedness of a landscape.

Aileen Murphy invites us to dive into a plethora of shapes and colors where representation is stripped of its referent. Her paintings seem to be executed with a focus on memories and the updated emotions of her own body. The artist suggests a way of working with color that avoids distance, consciously ignoring all kinds of philosophical theories and trends, and approaching her work with the spirit of welcoming and embracing desires, contradictions and errors of all sorts.

Curated by Cristina Anglada
Text: Cristina Anglada
Photos: Nick Ash