Repetitive forms, when viewed from certain angles, can reveal neat meticulously arranged patterns of shapes and colors. Cars in a parking lot viewed from above. Cereal boxes on a store shelf. Birds on a wire. But viewed from another angle, those neatly arranged forms quickly descend into chaos as shapes merge together, colors blend and a singular mass is formed. 
Coordinate, oil on panel, 28 x 38"
This second version of repetition is the kind that interests Christopher Murphy, who has a new show titled Tangle now open at Billis Williams Gallery in Los Angeles. The Southern Californian painter will have 10 works on view that show repetition in various forms, including many figurative works. The works were created during the Covid-19 pandemic, during a time of “social distancing.” But Murphy was not directly influenced by health protocols when creating this body of work. 
Rites, oil on panel, 25 x 42"“It’s less intentional and more intuitive when I’m working on a body of work. It’s more organic, such as making sketches, picking up on motifs and themes that repeat, noticing what’s going on here and what do I think about it,” Murphy says. “This show did come about from the midst of the pandemic, during a period of not being around people or crowds, but really it was a response to my previous body of work, which had more isolated figures, expansive landscapes and disconnected subjects. But then I started cramming people into the paintings so it was a tangle of limbs and bodies.”
Four on the Floor, oil on panel, 20 x 30"The origin of this shift from isolated figures to more crowded scenes really came to be after a driver crashed through Murphy’s studio, destroying a huge body of images. “It was 10 years worth of work. Just gone. I had to restart, and the restart was visceral and violent with explosions.
I never intended it to be a response to what happened, but it crept in from my subconscious. It really just evolved from there.”
I Thought We Settled on Florals, medium, oil on panel, 29 x 42"
Works in the show include Coordinate, a work that shows, depending on the viewer, either four similar-looking women or the same figure repeated four times, and Rites, which shows a group of men leaning forward creating an M.C. Escher-like effect with arms that seem to be attached to two bodies at once.
“Christopher Murphy’s paintings exist in a space between real and surreal. This new series is exquisitely painted figurative realism at first glance. At second glance, that reality splinters into questions about what is being depicted. Painted during the complicated last three years, these paintings are a visual representation of the experience of recent history,” says gallery partner Tressa Williams. “What appears at first glance to be groups of people, upon closer inspection reveals to be the same person repeated in different positions and at different angles. The paintings then become about an inner conversation—about the experience of being within a many-sided monologue…Christopher Murphy’s work is unexpected, thoughtful and gorgeously painted. The paintings are meticulous and have an edge that pushes the viewer to question and to explore.” —
Billis Williams Gallery
2716 S. La Cienega Boulevard • Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 838-3685 www.billiswilliams.com
Powered by Froala Editor
