Sonia Morange '96

ARTIST STATEMENT

Color is the driving force within my painting, demanding a continual search. My most recent works are assembled from scraps of painted canvas, color mixing experiments that I then cut down and sew together with colored thread via a machine cross -stitch. The paintings are built. The composition is found, flipped, reversed and added to. Thinking about looking through/looking in, cutting out, framing/unframing....creating peepholes and shadows. The sewn line anchors the shapes, allowing the painting to be experienced from behind and through to the front at the same time. It comes together as a patchwork vignette: a shifting floating space guided by color. Revealing and evoking narrative possibility with the primary elements of form, line and color.

The sliced surface and the sewn composition are not meant as iconoclastic gestures, but rather further investigate the aesthetic possibilities and forms a painting can take. Color, line and form are presented and used as concrete characters, not transcendental experience. They are my pawns in balancing the illusion with the physicality of the material object, while also being the subjects of a narrative within the pictorial space.

The works draw upon the history of painting, as well as textiles, patterns, narrative form and symbolism. They often start from a random mix of shapes lying around the studio, or sometimes from the desire to explore one color or a predetermined palette. At times they start with a representational form, or a movement, a word, but usually that arrives later in the process. Fragments from one painting can often be found in another. The compositions are arrived at through the process, in order to evoke visual perception.