Victoria Morton at Sadie Coles HQ

Victoria Morton, a young Scottish artist, describes her art as “explicit abstract realism.” Can an art work be both abstract and realistic? And what does Morton mean by “explicit”? Whatever she might mean, her art is good. Very good. There are large, small and medium sized paintings, caked with all the earthy richness of oils liberally applied  to the canvas – a pungent rainbow of splodges and smeared colours. There are freestanding pieces fashioned from tremulous things that look ready to float away or fall apart. There are tiny paintings which lean against walls or press delicately between other things – often painted too. Frames and stands are given almost as much aesthetic attention as the art they support.

This emphasis upon how her art should rest, or hang, or lean, in tension with what they rest, hang, or lean against, suggests that Morton’s work would fall apart without such careful attention. It is a room of things in perfect equipoise. The possibility of summoning an enraged curator with the sound of splintering wood is heightened considerably by the easily knocked over Ballet costume, (a delicate concoction of water-coloured tissue paper and tape), the easily bumped into Untitled 2010 (a fragile table on which a fragile little book is resting), and the easily kicked over Head, (a small piece of “incongruous” painted wood on a block of wood on the floor). Downstairs, there are more possibilities of bull-in-china-shop moments. Freestanding screens, as well as a piece in which two canvases seemed to be just about to fall from their shared frame (Shutters), an orange canvas perched on a yellow bin  (Untitled 2009) and another Untitled 2010 – a small piece of canvas resting between some bits of wood on a stool.

Prod some of these precarious works – even gently – and you’ll likely send them crashing to the floor. Everything has been crafted and displayed with thought and care and much of it probably wouldn’t last a day in anyone’s living room. But perhaps there’s a kind of strength in all this delicacy. There’s certainly tension in and between every artwork. Not only physical tension, in the propped-up, lean-to qualities of many of these works but tension too where great clusters of paint vie for the viewer’s attention. My eyes were unable to rest anywhere in the canvas, Figurine. There is so much going on – dots, lines, symbols, the half-formed possibilities of figures and things, and numerous and seamlessly merging shades of beautifully blended colour: one remarkable strength of her work. All this reaches its apotheosis in Wah Wah, a strange and sombre work, particularly for this multicoloured exhibition. Mostly very dark, one serpentine vermilion line can just be seen travelling up from the bottom of the canvas – breaking through the dirty mist and heading for the sunset glow burning at the very top.

Copyright Victoria Morton, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London