John McAllister

The scenery and interiors of McAllister’s paintings are derived from locations and places known to the artist but are not direct representations as such. They are re-imagined, drawn from a free-floating lexicon of motifs and imagery primarily emanating from the sun-drenched topographies of LA (McAllister’s home town until recently). At times McAllister pushes this imagery to allude to more tropical settings, as well as evoking the en plein air Mediterranean vistas and interiors depicted by artists like Monet, Matisse and Bonnard. In McAllister’s earlier work these Modern artists were more closely referred to and their presence more strongly felt.

In these new paintings those points of reference are less overt, now subsumed into a formal language where technique, composition and subject matter are becoming recognizably McAllister’s own. Also particular to McAllister’s painting is a pronounced engagement with the dualism of flat picture surface and illusionistic depth. Patterned carpets, tiles, rugs and wallpaper form two-dimensional borders arranged in such a way that they seem to slip off the picture surface. While the painting-within-a-painting, often depicted as if casually leaning against a wall (perhaps in the artist’s studio), are windows opening onto an exterior world. In McAllister’s painting this dualism is deftly balanced, the eye travelling easily between the physical immediacy of the scumbling on the painting surface and expansive space of the landscape beyond. There is a kind of optical rhythm at play, further enhanced by patterns of the surface and the foliage.

John McAllister (b. 1973, Slidell, Louisiana, USA) graduated from the Art Center College of Design in 2007 and is a 2007 Joan Mitchel Foundation MFA grant recipient. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has recently had solo exhibitions at James Fuentes, New York, 2011 and Richard Telles, Los Angeles, 2012. This is his first solo exhibition in London.