Illuminated Manuscripts (2005)

"Illuminated Manuscripts: Five Things about Alistair Magee
*Originally posted on 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.

-Pete Smith, 2005

(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.