PREVIEW: John McAllister-Be Delirious Reveries Ringing
The influences of French masters such as Matisse, Bonnard, or Braque during his fauvist period reveal John McAllister’s obsession with the spectral qualities of light and its capture. The vibrant palette concentrated on a close range of colors (often lavenders, reds and purples) produces a distinctive and luxuriant blast. In his large-scale paintings and panoramas, the dualism of flat picture surface and illusionistic depth upsets traditional perspective. Against backgrounds of geometric or foliate patterns that suggest exotic textiles, ersatz wallpaper or other artworks, each work depicts a still life, landscape or decorative interior often elegant yet bordering on the decadent.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Be Delirious Reveries Ringing” brings together over 30 paintings in oil on canvas of visionary landscapes, inspired by the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains in Western Massachusetts where John McAllister lives and works. McAllister seeks to represent – or rather recreate – moments of rapture that he encounters in nature. He intends the exhibition’s title as a command, as well as a testament to his own experience. His paintings offer abundant opportunities for delirious revery, even while exaggerating the conditions one might find in nature to unnatural extremes. McAllister rarely, if ever, paints from reference photographs. This might be surprising to followers of his work familiar with the paintings for which he first became known: scenes that incorporated pictures within pictures; landscapes framed by doors and windows; interiors framed by decorative borders. Those works foregrounded their pictoriality, not as a means to preclude absorption or rapture, but to enhance it. In these new paintings – and indeed most of his work made in the past three years –McAllister dispenses with the compositional quotation marks of his earlier pictures. They are vehicles for ecstatic absorption, no matter their or their format. The artist continues his exploration of tondos and cartouches, shaped canvases that replicate the human field of vision and which reveal the conventional rectangular picture plane to be as much a stylistic contrivance as a circle or an oval. McAllister has long been influenced by modernist artists such as Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse, who incorporated pattern and decoration into their paintings, as well as precedents such as the British Arts and Crafts movement, and the Transcendentalist writers and philosophers who established themselves in Massachusetts in the mid-19th century. None of those artists ever considered artifice and aesthetic contrivance to be incompatible with profound spiritual reflection or transcendence. He acknowledges that when immersed in even the most spectacular landscapes, it is impossible for him not also to be thinking about every landscape painting he’s ever looked at, not to mention every landscape photograph he’s seen, every film he’s ever watched or book he’s read. There is nothing inherently wondrous about a vista of land and sky; landscape is a cultural construction. For centuries, untamed wilderness was regarded as either threatening, foreboding, boring, unholy or just plain ugly. It is only really since the Romantic era that woodlands, lakes and sunsets have been so aesthetically revered. Wilderness has since been shaped by human intervention to encourage leisurely spectatorship; in Massachusetts, as with many densely inhabited areas, forests have been cleared, rivers dammed, picturesque lakes and ponds established, paths and viewpoints signposted.
Photo: John McAllister,Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, Abdijstraat 20 Rue de l’Abbaye, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 8/12/2022-14/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com/
