Michael Batty: Tones, Poems and Frequencies

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Michael Batty, "Tones, Poems and Frequencies," 2018

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Reception Thursday May 17, 6-8pm

Michael Batty’s practice has primarily been an exploration of abstraction’s legacy. It could be argued his work has content but not subject. Or rather, the subject is painting, with the content being the meaning or experience a viewer receives from the work. This exhibition marks his new approach to the painting subject, and the vivid floor sculpture is an important development. The formal, modernist grid is familiar, and the floor piece references the works of Carl Andre and other Minimalists. However, underlying the work is Batty’s interest in both electronic and jazz music, and the connection that exists between music and art.

In 1704 Isacc Newton pioneered a theory around the connection between hue in visual perception and tone in aural perception. Modernist experiments in the linking of visual art to music took root in the early part of the 20th c. with artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, Frank Kupka and Marsden Hartley all creating abstract works based on attempts to link painting with music. Around the same time, avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg was bringing ideas of experiential equivalency into his music and the way he visually expressed music.

Batty’s approach to his art has always been process-based and intuitive. The method of painting or assembling the grid works happens without a pre-set plan, in an attempt to create in the moment. But there is an emotional content to these pieces that belies their structured presentation. This connects to the idea of Jazz improvisation, where the organization of the overall tune allows individual freedom of expression to take place within it. The gridded layout of the paintings, collages and floor sculpture supply the structure and allow the colours within the work to freestyle. And like a Jazz performance, each laying of the floor sculpture creates a different expression; each 9 paneled Tone Poem has almost limitless possible outcomes.