Jean-Claude Lebensztejn's Study on Malcolm Morley's Violent Painting

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn has published a study on Malcolm Morley's oeuvre, comparing the experience to tracking a rare butterfly into Vesuvius's crater. Morley's painting is characterized by rage, excess, and a violence termed "the heterogeneous." His hyperrealism from the mid-1960s is described as objective, destructive, and precise, akin to Sade's method. Lebensztejn reveals the true nature of Morley's images of America, whose grimaces naively adhere to tourism's happiness image, close to "Grosz's spirit." This latent violence erupts in the "disaster paintings" series. Morley attacks images of a pernicious reality (e.g., segregationist South Africa) and his own painting (maltreating, cutting, crumpling, or staining it), unable to attack society itself after several stays in British prisons dissuaded him from real action. Through sublimation, his technique gains new processes. In the late 1990s, he added a "van" to his painter's toolkit (used to crush models for compositions). Morley constantly fights inhibitions, symbolic violence, and repression, which he considers inherent to modernist painting. He engages in what Lebensztejn calls an "eroticization of painting," seeking expanded sensations through hashish or LSD. The study was published in artpress in September 2002.