Nadege in her Studio The French artist, Nadege Morey, grew up in Normandy and moved to the United States at age 25, searching for new beginnings and blank canvases. Now, living in New York, she has elaborated a visual vocabulary over the last three years that achieves a striking dynamism with stark, minimalist compositions. Her visually captivating canvases feature two strong acrylic tones and collaged dictionary pages arranged into geometric forms and patterns. From the simple standpoint of visual pleasure, there’s a great deal of enjoyment to be taken from Morey’s patterns, bold colors and linear forms. Each work invites viewers into a movement—whether spiraling, zigzagging or circling—which one can’t help but follow.

In addition to her work’s visual allure, though, Morey marks interesting departures from, and dialogs with minimalism. She continues this aesthetic tradition, but adds the dimension of collage and text. In so doing, she not only evokes Kazimir Malevich and Sol LeWitt—whose striped, colorful geometrics she opens with  —but also Jasper Johns and Picasso—for their central incorporation of text. Morey tests the limits of collage and minimalism by juxtaposing them. Her black, red and yellow acrylic forms confound distinctions between movement and stasis, background and foreground, depth and surface. Meanwhile, the dictionary pages figure alternately as backdrop, figure, or another indeterminate form in the dimensional conundrum.

Even more intriguing than these plays with perspective and depth, Morey’s dictionary pages introduce an entirely new experience to minimalism. After all, if that artistic tradition is predicated on the complete absence of identifiable images, pasting page upon page of definitions into that environment constitutes a fairly radical move. Appearing as abstract forms from a distance, the details of Morey’s collages are full of completely literal, representational imagery. This sharp contrast between the large-scale and minute forms in her works makes them all the more powerful. Taken at different levels she seems to deal in monochrome abstraction, minimalist collage and dramatic text art. However one reads Morey’s work, though, the process is enjoyable and engaging.

www.nadegemorey.com

Black and Red 1 - Acrylic & Collage on Canvas 30'' x 30'' Black and Red 2 - Acrylic & Collage on Canvas 30'' x 30''