Morgan Stokes

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©2025  



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Richeldis Fine Art, Barcelona
October - December 2025

Virgin
Oigåll Projects, Melbourne
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2025

Virgin

Oigåll Projects
Melbourne/Narrm, Australia
5-22 June 2025
Photography by Annika Kafcaloudis
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Catalogue Essay
Transcending our earthly bodies, our data bodies spread forth and multiply weightlessly in the cloud. Reproductions of paintings - populating our feeds and our Photos app - do the same. In an evaporating world, our flesh sits stubbornly.

Undoubtedly the Western history of painting is mired in religion. The modernists and minimalists wanted to wipe the slate clean but still Sol LeWitt said, “conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach”. A strange parallel between believers and iconoclasts.

This show, Virgin, is a meditation on painting not as representation but as body in its own right. A figure formed from its own naked materiality; exploring how matter can become active, autonomous, and exposed.

The materials of painting and sculpture - canvas, paint, stretcher bars, stone - are not neutral. They carry a religious and aesthetic past, much like the concept of virginity: symbolic, burdened, mythologised. These materials have long served as vessels for human creativity for heavenly devotion as icons, frescoes and statues to name a few. One of the earliest known instances of a painting within a painting was in Stefaneschi Triptych by Giotto (c. 1320, commissioned for the Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome), which depicts a cardinal holding the very work he is depicted in - a sacred recursion tempting representation to collapse into presence.

Virgin navigates the transformation of painting from a vessel of purity and meaning to one of presence and sensation. The show remains faithful to the formula of painting and sculpture but dismembers and reconfigures their elements - paint to one side, stretcher bars to another - and through a degree of intervention their raw states gesture to their own nature, their histories and their relationship to one another. Lucio Fontana’s Manifesto Blanco declared that “matter manifests itself totally and eternally by growing throughout space and time.” To work with material is not merely to depict but to inhabit, to extend one’s own body into the things of the world.

Embracing a material consciousness with an engagement that is at once philosophical and physical, Stokes seeks to address the contradictions of our time: how the immaterial logic of the digital age collides with the weight of material tradition. Here, the fetishist’s gaze is recognised but not indulged; the myth of the untouched is neither celebrated nor destroyed. Virgin does not offer purity, but asks what it means to begin again with the weight of history still pressing in.

This is not a retreat into the mystical, but a conscious reckoning with painting’s history and its potential. How do we engage with painting when we are becoming virtual beings? When paintings very substance is laden with centuries of meaning? The works in Virgin hover between reverence and resistance embodying painting not as icon or image, but as surface made flesh. A beginning, perhaps.