Jeffrey Morabito

Glossalalia

January 25 – April 30, 2019

Photographed by: Dario Lasagni

Jeffrey Morabito’s formation as a painter has been exceptionally wide-ranging. His youth notwithstanding, over the past dozen years or so, he has lived and worked in Philadelphia, Seoul, Beijing, Manhattan, and Bushwick, Brooklyn. His extended experience of these diverse places and cultures, with their often radically varied qualities of light, geography, rhythms, routines, customs, and odors – among many other things, including different languages and alphabets – all resonate within his paintings, but not in ways that we might expect. Morabito describes his process as an amalgamation of memory, imagination, and perception, but the result is never literal. At times, we catch glimpses of suggestive images, while at others, we receive only hints or overtones. Despite this inherent diversity, we are also aware of constants. Whatever the original stimulus for the image, however loosely or specifically Morabito treats his nominal subject, we are always made aware of his enthusiasm for the materiality of paint and his belief in the expressiveness of touch, along with his preference for tonal nuance, as a means of evoking light and atmosphere. This exhibition, which includes work made between 2006 and 2019, is testimony both to the variousness of Morabito’s themes and preoccupations, and the single-mindedness of his approach to what a painting can be. The title, “Glossolalia” – “speaking in tongues” – is metaphorical reference to Morabito’s responses, over time, to his changing environment, provoked by external circumstances, but, at the same time, intimate expressions of acute, internalized perceptions and emotions.

Karen Wilkin, Curator, New York, January 2019