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Alistair Magee at Peak Gallery
Alistair Magee, a former Glaswegian now living and working in Toronto, is an exceedingly painterly painter who has here imported into his otherwise hectically painted pictures a calligraphic dignity that slows them down and lends them a certain humanistic seriousness.
The paintings are full of handwriting. But Magee's shards of writing are not wild, gestural loops and dashes of spontaneous pseudo-writing, as in the paintings of, say, American superstar artist Cy Twombly. Rather, Magee has searched out actual handwritten texts - note cards
found in libraries or simply scrawled scraps picked up in the street - and, with a huge, humbling output of delicate, labour-intensive effort, projects them onto his canvases, traces them, and then washes over them with his fluidities of pigment, leaving handwritten messages in low-relief, struggling to be ascertained. It is writing used, as critic-curator Daniel Baird puts it, in his elegant essay accompanying the show, "as a way of making contact with an intimate and often anonymous history, which is then buried again beneath the flow of paint.
"For me, Magee's paintings are easier to admire, however, than to
like. Their sociological aspects are fascinating. Here are the fragrances of deeds, of to-do lists and treaties, philosophical jottings, all of it clamouring away, trying to get all the way to meaning. It is not clear, however, that there is much to be gained by dropping
all this language into heaving seas of pigment. And the fact that most
handwriting slants from the lower left to the upper right, means that
there is as certain sameness and slickness to the look of the works (except for the handsome, DeKooning-esque Jogger, where the directions of the script change and confront one another). Also, Magee's use of the tondo form
(painting on a disc-like shape) is curious. Why is a circular form more suited to handwriting than a rectangle? If there isn't a good answer
to this question, then the result is just décor.
$2,900-$6,800.
Until April 23, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108
about the exhibition |
"Illuminated Manuscripts: Five Things about Alistair Magee"
by Pete Smith (Toronto)
samplesize.ca
Alistair Magee is a painter’s painter and as such, he is one
of the city’s best. His work incorporates the wonderful blend
of lush-painterly-expressive and wildly-neurotic-obsessive that best
epitomizes the art of painting. His paintings are worked and reworked,
painted over and then reworked again. Magee is the eccentric alchemist
turning muck into treasure, but he is also the careful monk transcribing
the Bible. The following ‘blurb’ is not really meant as
a review of Alistair Magee’s recent solo exhibition at Peak Gallery,
rather it is a set of connected yet meandering thoughts that attempt
to highlight what I feel are five key areas of interest in his work,
most notably (but not completely) it’s unique relationship to
contemporary discussions of abstraction and representation and the formation
of meaning in painting.
1. If there is anyone alive who uses acrylic paint better than Alistair
Magee then I simply haven’t seen it. (This is not to say that
the possibility does not exist, it’s merely to say that I have
not, as of yet, witnessed such an occurrence.) Acrylic paint is easy
to use badly, but exceptionally difficult to use well. Perhaps the most
impressive characteristic of Magee’s use of acrylics is evidenced
in his surfaces. Most acrylic abstractish paintings have very plasticy
surfaces. (Mostly because they are, in fact, a plastic surface.) Big
clumps of thick paint flatten out into small, soft ridges. (Even John
Kissick’s fantastic paintings succumb to this reality of the medium.)
Gel mediums and gloss mediums usually form surfaces that look like the
glass above the boards at a hockey rink. Magee’s surfaces, however,
have a warmth and depth that are more reminiscent of well executed encaustic.
Acrylic paints rapid drying time and chemical constitution usually create
choppy and abrupt brush strokes (1). Magee’s brush work is swooping,
fluid and highly conscientious. Also, the colours in most acrylic paintings
are flattened out and hollow, but Magee’s subtle variations, second
only in these parts to the better works of Anda Kubis, are somehow able
to breathe. Alistair Magee, along with the aforementioned John Kissick,
prove that real painters can use acrylic.
2. Alistair’s use of text is interesting and unique. Writer Daniel
Baird is right when he states in the catalogue essay that it would be
a mistake to think of Alistair’s texts as a purely aesthetic device.
Yet it would also be a mistake to think that these paintings are ‘about’
the texts that they offer. Unlike the text paintings of Joseph Kosuth
or Richard Prince, Magee’s paintings are principally about painting.
His texts draw attention to the well discussed relationship between
abstract gestures and written characters (2), a relationship well illustrated
by the more graphic paintings of artists such as Robert Motherwell,
Yves Klein, Harold Town and Jackson Pollock. But more like the alphabet
and number paintings of Jasper Johns, Magee’s work reminds us
that written characters are, in fact, abstract gestures and that their
meanings have been arbitrarily assigned. In a parallel world maybe Q
means T. (Maybe dog means cat?)
3. Would it matter if Magee’s paintings were not painted in English?
Would they come across differently in China? In many parts of Toronto
business signs don’t come with an English translation. They use
weird letters. I don’t know whether they read left to right, up
to down or down to up. I often wonder about those signs and the potential
messages they might carry. Maybe they aren’t even business signs
at all. Maybe they are warnings of catastrophic danger. (Maybe they
are not.)
4. Alistair Magee’s paintings are painted in English, but his
words are buried, blurred, dense and or fragmented. They are usually
difficult and often impossible to decipher. It is significant that these
are found texts. Letters found on the street. Crib notes at the library.
Sometimes the title conveys the source, sometimes it doesn’t.
The spectator is left to speculate on their meaning, just as the artist
often must with their source. Because of this, Alistair’s voyeuristic
texts carry a profound emotional resonance that is similar to that created
by British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. For like Whiteread, Magee’s
works are haunted by the ghosts of other people’s memories.
5. The manner in which Alistair Magee reproduces his texts is also significant.
They are projected and outlined with green, house-painters tape, the
shape of each letter faithfully retraced in a process similar to cardboard-cut-out-low-fi
screen printing. Beyond the obvious, pain-in–the-ass labor that
this process surely represents (my protestant upbringing and art history
class has taught me that there is divinity in labor) it is also significant
because it preserves the integrity of the original document. This process
displays a respect for his subject that is uncommon in contemporary
practices. These discarded letter fragments and crumpled up memos are
cherished by Magee. He invests as much attention into their subsequent
illumination as a medieval monk with his manuscripts. Taken as a whole,
Alistair Magee’s process causes a sort of leveling out of lived
experience by placing a special importance on the everyday and inconsequential.
Like the famous “date paintings” of On Kawara that raise
the significance of September 11, 2000 to that of September 11, 2001
(3), Magee’s paintings manage to raise the significance of the
grocery list to that of the written will.
Phillip Guston once said that the act of painting is like having both
of your hands stuck in a mattress. The idea being (I think) that painting
is about a subtle discomfort. Not merely a matter of filling in spaces
with appropriate colours and textures, it is a process of working and
reworking, painting over and reworking again. To Guston, painting was
about a soft struggle, a struggle for resolution. Alistair Magee’s
works embody this sort of soft struggle, for buried somewhere within
the muck and grime of these materials lies the gold that he’s
searching for.
(1) Once they’re there. They’re there.
You can’t fiddle with them an hour later. You can paint over them,
but the scars will remain.
(2) I’m pretty sure that there’s a section in Rosalind Krauss’
“Optical Unconscious” (the part about Pollock?) that’s
devoted to this discussion. It also might have been in Briony Fer’s
“On abstract art”. Wherever it was that I read it, I remember
it being quite interesting and largely true. Regardless, the abstract
gesture/written character discussion has become part of the quasi-academic
mush that floats around in my brain.
(3) This is meant merely as a universally understood example. I could
have used January 1, 2000 and January 2, 2000. Please pretend that I
did.
-Pete Smith, 2005
about the exhibition
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