The Vortex

'I love you/I love you/I love you/What's your name?' That's Kim Gordon's vocal, repeated over and over, on 'Drunken Butterfly', from Sonic Youth's Dirty (1992). She's got a point. Sometimes incomprehension - or, at least, appreciating a person or thing while it remains categorically nameless - is aphrodisiacal. Sometimes confusion is sex.

Victoria Morton had Dirty in mind when titling her year-in-the-making breakthrough painting Dirty Burning (1997). On first impression it's a flaming miasma of tangerine, hot pink, crimson and brilliant white that roars diagonally across a mud-dark background, throwing sparks against it - a bunch of carnations igniting on a dying bonfire. But get past the inflammatory cues and you realize that, as Gertrude Stein said of Cleveland, there's really no there there: no figure, no ground, no flames, just a seductive maelstrom of endlessly self-energizing collisions between predatory swarms of dots, dashes and flick-of-the-wrist strokes on a variety of scales, kicking against their neighbours to deliver a hypertrophied sense of Baroque movement and multi-perspectival depth. Scale, too, is liquid and relative: the disembodied eye zooms in on a cluster of subatomic stipples, slides sideways a couple of inches and lands on a comparatively colossal swathe of paint. Obvious stage management repeatedly dukes it out with evident accident. It's a genuinely trippy experience, a parade of builds and breakdowns that, for all the time you've got to spare, encourages you to merge with it.

Merging is an especially vertiginous experience if you feel the other has more to give than you could ever take. Since 2000 (following a hiatus in which she worked mainly with Glasgow-based artists' group Elizabeth Go) Morton has rarely held back, making paintings that pull Dirty Burning's coil of ideas into increasingly bright extension. Shower (2002) features an oval vortex of overlapping and variously shaped paint swatches in a moody rainbow of shades - cadmium red, olive green, mahogany, ultramarine, yellow ochre - spinning with increasing complexity and ever-reducing scale into the centre of a ground made up of modulating off-white, as if someone were trying hastily to paper over a psychedelic abyss. This painting's element of sensuality may be a function of its slow condensation, before your eyes, from mystifying cosmic hiccup into stuttering multi-spatiality. Or it may emanate from its distant origin in a pair of backsides sampled from David Hockney's paintings of showering men.

Such figurative snags are scattered throughout Morton's paintings. The anomalous outline suspended like sky-writing in the sodium-yellow air of the landscape-like Myself When I Am Real (2002) turns out to be an annexed section of Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin (1605-6), while elsewhere in this work - peeping out of the orchestrated avalanche of highly coloured three-dimensional ambiguities that tumbles wilfully from top left to bottom right - there's a purloined sliver of a Giorgio Morandi. Echoes reverberate, in other works, of Frank Auerbach, Caspar David Friedrich, Joachim Patenier, Giotto and a favourite wooden chair; but whether you recognize them is pretty much nugatory. What counts is their impaction on canvas in sufficient kaleidoscopic density to hold the viewer motionless, except for the slow swivel of eyeballs in sockets.

That lock-down is crucial. For as much as Morton's works are to some degree self-portraits - accretions, she says, of whatever cultural and emotional matter gusts through her during their making - they are also mechanisms designed to ensure a lengthy encounter that leads to an interpretation of their tricksy and diffuse events. This movement, from darkness to glimmering light, is literalized in the iconography of nocturnes such as Plus and Minus (2000), Night Geometry (2002) and Eustace (2002), whose hard-to-read topography of tenebrous, angled planes (the best allegory -
a smoothed-out sheet of crumpled paper - has already been made) are punctured with multiple polychrome stab wounds. It takes time to sink beneath their forbidding surfaces and come back up with a mouthful of pearls. And inevitably you turn away without having fully plumbed their depths.

If such a time-consuming process again recalls certain pieces of music - Morton Feldman's glacial, repetition-free, five-hour string quartets, for instance - that is as it should be. Morton has repeatedly said she's interested in applying the musical notion of continuous composition to painting, and credits as pivotal her experience of LaMonte Young and Marianne Zazeela's continually unfolding, impossible-to-predict microtonal installation Dream House: Eight Years of Sound and Light, which she experienced - only in part, obviously - in New York in 1994. A musician herself (she plays bass with Son of Kong), she's also composed pieces for installations, such as Pleasure and Practice (2002). Designed to be heard in a canary-yellow room fitted with suspended metal hoops, this 14-minute, impossible-to-memorize soundscape skips from spastic-Funk bass figures to Edgard Varèse-like recorder/piano duets spliced with arrhythmic, whiplash percussion, without a repeated bar. It's temptingly easy to map Morton's mercurial paintings on to such productions.

Unlike her music, however, which skronks onward whether you pay attention or not, Morton's paintings seem to come to life only under the viewer's persistent gaze; they ask you to move gingerly from facet to facet, as if using sinking chunks of ice to negotiate a dangerous river. The pay-off is substantial: an exaggeration of the Promethean subtext of viewing, and an experiential zone where - because it seems we're making up something beautiful and complicated as we go along - we feel blazingly real. True, that's 'real' in the sense of every disco track that ever used the word, a chimerical epiphany that can't sustain itself when the house lights go up. But such is the winking mirage conjured by Morton's art in general, and in particular by Withdrawal (2002), a gauzy, myopia-rehearsing patchwork of soft squares and recumbent rectangles in a Klee-like palette of antique lavender, dilute aqua and blush pink that solidifies as you look across it into an architectonic but unfathomable sequence of crystalline swells and cavities, distant landscapes and Cubist cloud castles. What's your name, you find yourself saying, I've forgotten my own.