Morgan Croney is an artist who takes Sol LeWitt’s famous dictum, “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically”, quite seriously. His complex of geometric forms and mathematical notations suggest nothing so much as deliberately purposeful rationality while leading nowhere – nowhere rational, anyway – and giving very few clues as to the mechanism of their production. The result is a critique of rationality – or, maybe, rationality for its own sake, devoid of its normal impulses.

One is also reminded of Einstein’s famous statement, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Math, itself, may seem to exist in its own realm – some transcendental abstract space composed of purely geometric form and the clinical precision of numbers themselves. But that’s an illusion. Math is a language, the most ostensibly universal language that humans have created. But it’s still nothing more than a complicated set of abstract ideas that our clever brains have devised. A product of biological beings trying to deny, even, their own corporeality in lieu of something ostensibly more perfect. Maybe this is why mathematical genius’ stereotypically go insane. The desire for perfect antiseptic abstraction – a celestial perfection that prompted Galileo Galilei to say “God wrote the universe in the language of mathematics” – sits uncomfortably with the imperfect, fuzzy, provisional logic of our day-to-day existence, not to mention the even more grotesque business of living as physical, biological organism. But maybe that’s where art comes in. In fact, Croney’s art would seem to exist at the juncture of these apparent opposites – a place where reason and nonsense collapse into each other.