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Pard Morrison’s modestly scaled aluminum fabrications are whispered meditations on the language of hard-edged painting and architectural space. Working with a singularly deadpan palette reminiscent of Necco candy wafers, Morrison slyly subverts what, at first glance, appears to be decorative riffs on Minimalism. But the work rewards concentrated looking, revealing smartly edited commentary on painting’s flatness and its materiality.
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these shapes, velvety coats of enameled pigment glaze the surfaces and wrap around the edges. The surfaces are organized into blocks of color that manipulate perspective, giving the push-pull illusion of stacked or unfolding cubes.
The fresh anomaly in Flicker is its subtle, but snappy flip-flopping between an object in real space and a fiction on canvas – or in Morrison’s case, pigmented aluminum. But for a small square of yellow ochre punctuating the bottom right, a dusky gray/blue evenly coats what appears to be the silhouette of a greatly enlarged piece of jigsaw puzzle or an agonized map of gerrymandering. This irregular rectilinear shape hovers 1 ¼ inches from the wall, casting a subdued gray/blue shadow that is both a phenomenon of light and the optical illusion of dimensionality. It exerts a mysterious and unexpected emotional pull, commingling the ethereal and the physical.