Keltie Ferris

Morán Morán is pleased to announce Keltie Ferris’ second exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s first in Mexico City. Titled +++c+o+n+t+a+c+t+++, this exhibition presents seven new paintings that are of two different series, including a site-specific wall drawing. Four vibrant paintings compositionally break from a heavy-knit grid, and the other three, as well as the wall drawing, make use of delicately flowing line work rendered over a blank expanse. Coming from dissimilar directions, these two series exemplify Ferris’ ability to adeptly shift within his own practice from one method of expression to another.

With the grid-based abstractions, the artist interrupts a geometrical system by employing various shapes and marks that loosely reference blooming flowers or explosions of light. Through a palette that seems to include the spectrum in its most potent hues, these works toy with balancing excess and restraint alongside exaggerating the tension between organic and orderly forms. The figure/ground complications that arise from Ferris’ color combinations and layering of various paint applications (sprayed and brushed) are an achievement in illusion as the eye searches for visual hierarchy. There is a performance borne by this technique, and the compositional trope of leaving the center of the image empty, further insists on the illusion because it brings our attention to the frame.

Sharing a more obvious lane with performance, the line-work paintings are ethereal yet undeniably physical. Here, Ferris allows the hand to be very direct and we witness the aftereffect of pastel pigments moving with speed over a white gessoed canvas. These intuitive and quick images feel like a pure translation of the fluidity inherent within the natural world, of grasses in wind, spirogyra in water. His colorful threads dance with an unchoreographed ease, becoming even more spectral because he returns to his formalized process of erasure by making rhythmic swipes across the lines. This process lends another conversation to the figure/ground relationship and the resulting blur creates its own abstract phenomenon.

Responding to the unique architecture of the gallery space, Ferris executed a wall-drawing that thematically converses with the canvases. With this ephemeral gesture, the artist articulates the physicality and spontaneous essence of the line works. The cohesion of this exhibition lies in the artist’s effort toward experimentation – images confirmed through the act of repetition and how gaps between gestures are not so much negative space but rather moments of potential connection.

— Morán Morán Gallery