Simon Morley’s exhibition at Gallery Baton presents a group of new paintings that bring cinema and literature into contact upon the monochrome surface of painting. The title of the exhibition, ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ is that of a classic Hollywood ‘film noir’ directed by Robert Aldrich made in 1955, starring Ralph Meeker as a tough private detective who kisses several women while trying to foil a plot to steal radioactive waste. The act of kissing and the threat of nuclear Armageddon are rather unsubtly bonded to each other in what is essentially a movie of Cold War paranoia.

The initial visual experience of Morley’s paintings is of an undifferentiated field of colour, and only gradually do images and words emerge from the chromatic envelope. At first, we see a list of words, which come from the indexes or contents pages of books in Morley’s collection, and are mostly sourced from books of politics, psychology, poetry, philosophy and religion. They evoke a world characterized by intellectual thought, an awareness of history the quest for meaning and value, but removed from their original contexts and functions they areenigmatic fragments.

The font he has used throughout is called ‘American Typewriter’. These words appear in orderly rows, and are painted in relief and just a tone lighter than the rest of the painting. They cast shadows, and so are more clearly present, responding to the sense of touch.