Eleanor Moreton Recent Paintings
Painting with a savoir faire tempered by the hand of
introspection, Eleanor Moreton lays the pictorial and figural tradition bare in a haze of
its own mythology. Bleak saturation and reverent hues consume the canvas. Layered
strokes cut back on themselves allowing the painter's past to seep through her final coat
of oil. Unlike John William Waterhouse's narrative depiction of the Arthurian legend,
Moreton's "Ladies of Shalott" is the moment of the turn of the head, of the cracked
mirror. In her revision, an ever-festering malady is forged.
Half sick of shadows, as legend has it, high up in her prison tower, the Lady of Shalott is
cursed to experience the world through the mirror placed before her. No longer able to
withstand such a fate, the lady turns to see what has forever existed behind her--the
mirror cracks. With a blurred vision, somewhere between the realm of shadows and the
realm of flesh, the lady takes three paces through the room and it is in this fleeting
moment before inevitable demise that Moreton's work lingers. She paints
monochromatic rooms of green plagued to slip away, regal figures of indiscernible
gender, and gaunt landscapes dedicated to Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg
Waldmüller. Historical events, fables, memories, literature and found images collapse in
on themselves and become symptoms of a faceless malady that when viewing Moreton's
"Ladies of Shalott" we too are stricken by.
Katie Schetlick, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, 2010
All Appeared To Be Well
In the Waldmüller paintings and the interiors I'm trying to unpick a sense of domestic cosiness, to bring dis-ease to a fiction that all is well. Ferdinand Waldmüller's flower and folk paintings supported a mythology that all was well within the Austrian Hapsburg Empire, which, like others power centres of 19th century Europe, sought to promote the virtues of the ideal home. Domestic interiors present an image that the home is a safe and nurturing environment. The work of the Austrian Sigmund Freud and the schools of psychoanalysis that followed him, unpick the fiction of the home as a safe place. Maybe home is no more than a fantasy created by the human desire for safety and there is indeed "no place like home".
Eleanor Moreton 2011