John McAllister’s paintings seem to exist in the interim between illusion and tangibility. Created within a consistent window-like format, this new body of work reveals visions characterized by a sense of time that is at once flattened, still, and shimmering. As portals into McAllister’s material and psychological investigations, his phosphorescent landscapes and still lives look inward. While previous works have approached a panoramic view and scale so as to unfold temporally as the eyes move from left to right, McAllister’s new series adopts a restricted, repeated scale in order to further push at the limits of perception and peripheral vision inherent to his images. These simultaneously shadowless and reflective scenes envelop language as well, taking up a repeated poetic three-word form for each title. Such unifying elements—as well as recurring visual motifs—activate the physical interludes between each electric picture plane. As critic Roberta Smith describes, McAllister is a painter “unafraid to embrace the medium or its history, or to toy with the ratios of hedonism and skepticism therein.”
John McAllister (b. 1973 in Slidell, LA, lives and works in Florence, MA) holds a BFA from the University of Texas, Austin, and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Recent solo exhibitions include cymbals of sleep uncurtain the night, James Fuentes, New York (2018); botanic haunting soft-static, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2017); wished-for wilds, Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2017); riot rose summary, Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels (2016); chorus clamors sultry, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin (2016), sudden thunder some motley sea, Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo (2015); and serene raving radiant, James Fuentes, New York (2015). McAllister is currently featured in a two person exhibition with Richard Hawkins at Richard Telles, Los Angeles.
