Daniel Faria Gallery Book

By Barry Schwabsky

The Madcap Swimmers Kristine Moran showed in 2020 must have made an impressively severe ensemble. A set of seven largish (five by four feet) paintings of rigorously limited palette (black, pink over white, and the beige of the linen support), they would appear to be a modular set of interchangeable variations-or rather a set of sets, since not only are the same few elements repeated within each painting, but also from painting to painting. It's a kind of minimalism but more in the musical than the art historical sense (think of Philip Glass's Music with Changing Parts, 1970, rather than, say, Donald Judd). The repeated, intersecting elements are: pairs of ovals connected by horizontal lines in pink scumbled over white and wide black arcs, as well, of course, as the already-mentioned beige linen ground. Each element only ever appears as a fragment: the curving black bands never form a full round, the identity of form of the lines and ovals only emerges implicitly since one never sees the whole configuration at once. And, it goes without saying, the underlying ground appears prominently, but only as an array of discrete shapes.

But this is what ought to be a contradiction in terms: a figurative minimalism. Those are heads coming at you in the paintings, swimmers in bathing caps and goggles. A horde of swimmers. Their individual identity has been submerged–a word I choose advisedly. This is the multitude. These swimmers are not the same–not clones, let's say–but their differences don't count here. Who can tell their gender, their race? Well, I think they are women, but I don't see that they would not nonetheless accept me as one of them if I were to don their caps and goggles. What counts is having plunged into the same fluid environment and being similarly prepared to move in it with resolution, with power, and-remember that they are madcaps-with fun, pleasure, exuberance. What counts is the joy of being together and of acting en masse. That's why there is nothing sinister in the encounter with these Madcap Swimmers. They are not acting against you, they are here to encompass you. The best way to see them might be the impossible one; if only we could turn around and face the future with them, seeing these comrades of ours just with the eyes at the back of our heads!