March 23, 2005 – April 23, 2005

Alistair Magee | 'Whiggamore' - paintings | review

> opening Saturday, April 02 | 2 - 6pm

Alistair Magee 'The Said Defunct'. 2004 | acrylic on canvas, 48" x 48"

Alistair Magee 'Scottish Will', 2005 | acrylic on canvas, 48” x 48”

Alistair Magee 'Silva', 2005 | acrylic on canvas, 25” diam. 'Majesty', | 2005, acrylic on canvas, 25” diam.

'In my recent work handwriting is used to underpin the painting. Traditional aspects of painting - brushwork, colour, composition, combine with the distinctive properties of handwriting and language to offer an uneasy alliance. The act of crossing over from the accepted codes of one language to another is an attempt to capture complex meanings.

The source material for these works can be intimate letters of the recent past, or dog-eared scribbles found in the street.

The technique employed to make these paintings often involves repetitive stenciling, which is used as a system or grid to support the more expressive brushwork. Stenciling, like printmaking, takes some of the immediacy out of painting. It is more at the mercy of process. It operates almost like collage. It has abstract qualities. Ultimately, this process, distances the act of painting from my direct experience or memory.

Alistair Magee is a painter originally from Scotland now living in Toronto. In this show of recent paintings Magee employs repetitive stencilling as a grid to support expressive brushwork. In these works found objects and personal memorabilia ally to reinforce the richness of ordinary urban experience. A preoccupation with history and politics underpins these paintings whilst Magee attempts to unmoor language to question its meaning and pull it back into the realm of abstraction