ANDREA MORGANSTERN

Andrea Morganstern’s Atomism

Modest in size, Andrea Morganstern’s paintings are grand in conception. Their very titles proclaim it: Creation, Flow, Microcosm… They want to envision how things are, or how they might be, rather than how they appear. In that sense, her art amounts to a kind of homemade philosophy—but one whose roots are ancient. Atomism arose independently in Greece and India: a way of accounting for the intuition that the world as we see it is not the ultimate reality—according to Democritus of Abdera, what we perceive is merely νόμος (nomos), which is variously translated as convention, custom, or opinion. Reality, he maintained, was only the imperceptible: atoms and void. In ancient Buddhist thought, atoms are not material substance but minimal quanta of energetic change—momentary events.

Painting may not require a choice between these two atomisms. A painted dot is a minute bit of matter but also, as color, a kind of vibration, a trace of energy. In Morganstern’s work these chromatic atoms gather, disperse, form worlds and abolish them, evoke all the sensations that Democritus attributed to nomos—heat and cold, sweet and bitter, and of course color itself in all its intensities and relations—while suggesting their own transitory and intangible nature. And what about the monochromatic grounds on which these atoms appear? Do they represent the void? I think not. In this, she is closer to India than to Greece: The variegated facture of the nebulous grounds reminds us that, if we could only look more closely, these too are accumulations of tiny particles—neither solid nor void but energetic clouds of color.

 

                                                                                                                                                     —Barry Schwabsky