CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/25/2021

'Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993' is NEW from Sobersove Press

“Untitled (Rising Abyss Study)” (1992) is reproduced from Painting is a Supreme Fiction, Soberscobe Press’s enlightening 312-page compendium of the underrecognized artist and poet Jesse Murry's art criticism, alongside previously unpublished philosophical writing and poetry from 1980 to his death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44. “As a painter, I mis-read and substitute or make available priorities that address my needs,” Murry asserts in the titular essay, written while he was a student of Harold Bloom at Yale, c. 1986. “For weather, I substitute light, knowing as I do that light is color and color light; light is substance as color is substance or pigment; light as pigment-color is light-imbued substance which in its deployment makes space and in the making of space can assert, deepen, or deny the plane. It can also evoke weather as temperature, climate, light, etc. As an artist, I know these conditions are both part of the factual, visual nature of paint which has the transformative capacity to evoke and possess a metaphoric or poetic power which can be seen as weather. [Wallace] Stevens turns to the idea of weather as a theologian turns to the idea of God. I turn to the idea of God and the knowledge of weather and the experience of light as the materia poetica of painting which transforms painting into a supreme fiction. And I know that the light as weather, as God, takes on a spiritual force and poetic power as the tangible and concrete manifestation of the imagination makes the particulars of my subjectivity or inwardness tenable, actual, real.”