Simon Morley was born in Eastbourne, England in 1958. Got BA of modern history at Mansfield college, Oxford University in 1980 and MA of fine art at Goldsmith's college, University of London in 1988. Based in Allier in France and Kent in England, participates artist-in-residence in various places as the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, the British School in Rome, and Centre d'art contemporain de Pougues-les-Eaux in France. Besides creating art works, he also curates exhibitions and writes essays in art journals. He is an author of a study on art history, "Writing on the Wall - Word and Image in Modern Art, Thames and Hudson, 2003".

Word and Image
His work always deals the relation between word and image as: "VIRUS" - certain word is painted in characteristic type (each type has historical meaning) in front of its background with randomly floating multicoloured letters, "signature painting" - a signature by prominent figure is enlarged and painted on the wall of certain place to which the person has relation, "label painting" - hand painted labels to explain works displayed at an exhibition, "book painting" - cover or title page of a book is transcribed on canvas, "DVD painting" - a jacket for DVD of film or still of film with subtitles is transformed into painting, "postcard painting" - postcards collected from bric-a-brac shops are reproduced on canvas, a work in which photographs of gravestones and words from poems are combined into pairs, a video work showing 10 different mouths saying the last lines of Wordsworth's poem in slow motion without sound, and books published by imaginary publisher, Utopia Press.

Hitchcock's Blondes
Works on view are paintings of which subject is films by the famous British director, Alfred Hitchcock who is named God of the suspense film. Morley paints the names of heroines in Hitchcock's films on canvases according to the style of typography used in the title back of the films. Following ten actresses are taken for his paintings this time. Margaret Lockwood from "The Lady Vanishes", Joan Fontaine from "Rebecca", Ingrid Bergman from "Notorious", Ann Todd from "The Paradine Case", Anne Baxter from "I Confess", Grace Kelly from "To Catch a Thief", Kim Novak from "Vertigo", Eva Maria Saint from "North by Northwest", Janet Leigh from "Psycho" and Tippi Hedren from "Marnie". They are all beautiful actresses with blond hair whom Hitchcock appointed willingly. Morely uses delicious gold color for these paintings being associated with blonde.

Modern Godesses
In these Morley's paintings, the credit of the name of heroine appearing in the title back of the film is translated into a language of painting. Usually the title back of film is carefully produced with an intention to let the audience to have a foreboding of the contents or the atmosphere of the main volume. Here in his paintings, it is simplified into only letters in a single color. The normal conventions of figure-ground contrast are replaced by more subtle variations between surface and text. We can see in these new paintings Morley uses the same method as "Noriko" paintings shown in the last exhibition "Classic Japanese Movies". ("Noriko" series is the white colored painting of a still by Yasujiro Ozu, with the appearance of Japanese famous actress Setsuko Hara.) They are both the reduction from a still of film into a painting. Also common at the point treating "the Modern Godesses" as Setsuko Hara and Hollywood actresses. On the other hand, these new works are close to his book painting as omitting images and being limited to text, and are also connected to his signature painting in the point describing a name of a person. Gold
This time again Morley succeeded in taking us away from the actual exhibition space to various different worlds through letting us to have some phased judgement and understanding. When looking rectangle canvas covered with gold color at first we would get some precious and gorgeous impression or feeling which is somewhat different from our usual appreciation of ordinary painting. Though gold is just one color among many colors, it reminds us special value since it is strongly united to the gold as metal. Getting close to the works, then we understand they are paintings and find something painted on it. Reading it, the viewer have to work more actively in order to turn raw perceptual information into a cogent sign. If we are elder than certain age, we can understand they are the names of former female filmstars. Looking some paintings, we could notice the point in common of those actresses, that is, they are all "Hitchcock's Blondes". The fact that those works are painted in gold color helps us to recall that Hitchcock liked to use blond beautiful actress as a heroine in his films and it also suggests that Hitchcock symbolizes the golden age of Hollywood films. We may recall beautiful figures of those actresses and their other films or get sentimental by thinking about those ages. They are all dexterous devices which Morley contrived. This is his fourth show at taguchi fine art, ltd.

* The text provided by taguchi fine art, ltd.