In Wil Murray's recent paintings, there is something of the series of portrait-landscapes of Dana Schutz's gouged 'Face Eaters' and Sandra Meigs's 'Dummies.' Colours are extreme yet restrained through an inherent delicacy, and paint is pushed to its limits, associating 1980s hyper-neon in plastic bliss. Murray creates textures and patterns, both flat and three-dimensional, that associate and ventriloquize other media. Within compressed tableaus, pressured seams reveal miniature caverns of yogurt-like pools in the painting 'Fuck This Mothafuckin' Pool', while transparent pink dots compete with the cross-sections of brain-like purple foam. Early paintings such as 'Nesting Dolls' and 'Clara Bowes and Open Toes' stretch out into a less interesting patterned landscape, while more recent paintings demonstrate how gaping and interrupted growth is the more natural context for Murray's process.

'Birthday Party Shouting Shooting' includes a polka-dotted claw or tooth, ballooned out in beak-hook; the narrative hook of the painting. Other paintings associate the early creature effects of 'Evil Dead' and Dario Argento's 'Demons' wherein eyes became green, blue, glowing red - a subterranean and waxy range of colors associating something beyond normal sight and normal perception. This kind of analogy-based seeing is something Murray's paintings invite, wherein the eye casts around, clamping to the seams of shapes made iconic only by extension.

When Murray allows brushwork to live within these tableaus, as the black mane-like sweep in the painting 'Casual Friday Morning Coming Down' and the glistening loops in 'Sexing Up The Lipsticked Pork,' the associations and clashing of paint-media-personas create enough tension to allow interest beyond other areas of novelty, and represents some of his strongest work.

Murray has written about literature and music as part of where his paintings live, perhaps due to an attraction to contexts that allow a particular energy which relates to a personal experience and immediate influence. The artist has stated "In the end, I never wind up with the thing I am attempting to do, but rather some Frankenstein that has far more to do with the rash and the ridiculous than the original object, or the desire to replicate it...Hyperbolic mistakes and the arrogance they provide take me where I didn't know I wanted to be."

Murray's paintings have a presence that is process and time-based and relates to philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's idea that "there is at the core of time a gaze," as the artist has written about his work as a narrative of layered creation that can be seen nonlinearly. The paintings also relate to a self-generative theme of identity as constant re-habitation either literally or metaphorically, similarly used by recent painters Kristine Moran and Krisjanis Katkins-Gorsline. This is particularly described by Moran in a statement of her work wherein a survival instinct of transformation allows "protagonists" in the paintings an "anthropomorphic value, which transforms them into both shelters and beings at once."

In an interview with the artist about his January 2008 show 'The Brawl of the Beast', Murray said "I'm not joking when I refer to the many me's that speak in the making of a painting. I can't imagine trying to seek cohesion in my own identity as represented by the paintings I make. I often think that I do not exist, except with others because I'm not really anything if not perceived by another. But by the same token, all others are me because there simply is no place for me that I am not. We kind of come to each other obliquely and rub a little."

Alongside Murray's interest in a constant regeneration of new rules and a sense of multiple performance, the paintings reveal and accompany a fascination with words and readability, as well as the necessity of making textual and visual language inhabitable and personally communicable.

Wil Murray is exhibiting in 'Grreeden', alongside artist Justin Evans, from June 25 - September 11.