Spaced Out

Craig Moran’s large, colorful new paintings sometimes remind the viewer of Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmares, sometimes of Joan Miro’s paranoiac abstracts in which a figure is being looked at by projected perceivers.  But they are always distinctive.
Moran’s method incorporates a kind of surrealist automatism.  Piles of drawings, graffiti, advertisements, and pictures from nature books sit on a table in his studio.  He cuts out shapes from these, arranges them at random to create new images, then cuts up the result and repeats the process until he finds dreamlike images that set him forth on a journey he says is both mysterious and exhilarating.