Emma Murphy
The Transfiguration is one of the miracles performed by Jesus. He becomes metamorphosed on top of the Mount of Transfiguration. According to interpretation, this is the culminating point of His public life. Irish artist Stephen Morris took this moment from Jesus’s life as the inspiration for the magnificent Transfiguration, 2013. Morris’s practice is based precariously between the representation of abstraction and figuration. He creates not just a way of seeing the world, but a way to formulate and conceive what we understanding through two and three dimensional explorations. Just as a child builds, paints and creates objects in attempt to understand their surroundings, Morris compiles worlds of brutality mixed with elegance, a method he employs to formulate and represent his paintings and sculptures.
The Transfiguration by Morris is derived from High Renaissance Art in both form and content. The arched structure that frames the painting, assembled from scraps of paper, and the religious symbolism are appropriated from images such as Lorenzo Lotto’s c.1511, The Transfiguration of Christ. In the 21st Century version, Christ is far from monumentality or reverence; he is in fact quite the opposite, a beastly hybrid of man and monster. According to Matthew 17 of the New Testament, “There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.” We bear witness to nothing so heroic or mysterious in this contemporary version. Christ is transmuting alone inside his cave,
not surrounded by his fellow apostles atop Mount Tabor, as Lotto’s image dictates, here he is resoundingly and obstinately alone. The floor of his cave is not made of earth or stone; the soft, opulent lines indicate he is perched atop a bed, a sumptuous, welcoming bed. The painting becomes a recontextualisation of a once very public miracle in the life of Christ into an intimate, lonely tale. Alone in his cave, this figure is mutating as his hands dissolve before his eyes. This is no longer the culmination of a public life as the Bible indicates; this painting is a very personal and intimate transformation of a very private kind.
The Transfiguration by Morris is derived from High Renaissance Art in both form and content. The arched structure that frames the painting, assembled from scraps of paper, and the religious symbolism are appropriated from images such as Lorenzo Lotto’s c.1511, The Transfiguration of Christ. In the 21st Century version, Christ is far from monumentality or reverence; he is in fact quite the opposite, a beastly hybrid of man and monster. According to Matthew 17 of the New Testament, “There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.” We bear witness to nothing so heroic or mysterious in this contemporary version. Christ is transmuting alone inside his cave,
not surrounded by his fellow apostles atop Mount Tabor, as Lotto’s image dictates, here he is resoundingly and obstinately alone. The floor of his cave is not made of earth or stone; the soft, opulent lines indicate he is perched atop a bed, a sumptuous, welcoming bed. The painting becomes a recontextualisation of a once very public miracle in the life of Christ into an intimate, lonely tale. Alone in his cave, this figure is mutating as his hands dissolve before his eyes. This is no longer the culmination of a public life as the Bible indicates; this painting is a very personal and intimate transformation of a very private kind.