Mickey in the midnight kitchen

Katy Moran's canvases often suggest the idyllic 18th-century paintings of Watteau and Fragonard blurred into dreaminess: their hazy smears of blue, green, pink and grey suggestive of silk, swings and summertime skies. If those colour-cued subjects aren't there, it's hard to say what is: Moran gets her images from Google, then inverts them for instant abstraction, suspending her painterly improv when a recognizable scene begins to bloom. The results are populated by phantoms, but nostalgia isn't Moran's bag: probing the points where binaries collapse into each other, her art queries the rationalities that underlie taste's thin divisions. It's also a magic trick, compounding démondé approaches into lush quasi-abstracs that threaten to free-fall into kitsch but, disarmingly, never do. (M. Herbert, Frieze Art Fair Yearbook 2007-8, London 2007.)