James Fuentes Gallery

James Fuentes is delighted to present sun sundry beguiles wild, John McAllister’s seventh solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition features seven new large-scale landscapes that extend the artist’s long pursuit of painting as an immersive, sensorial field.

On his ritual bike rides through the woods surrounding his home in Florence, Massachusetts, McAllister observes the seasonal extremes of New England—the decadence of spring, the lushness of summer, the dense quiet of winter. These impressions return to the studio as radiant tableaux, where natural rhythms of light and decay are heightened into patterns of color and sensation. He often describes glimpsing the land as if through a proscenium, a stage that first reveals beauty and then draws him inward, becoming what he calls a “portal into your own interior.”

A centerpiece of the exhibition, ablaze rapt chorus beaming (2025), is a monumental nine-by-fourteen-foot panorama suffused with incandescent yellow light. At its center, a semicrescent sun hovers over a mirrored horizon, radiating outward into powder pinks, violets, and cobalt accents. The scene is bordered by foliage blooming in lavender, mint, and oaky greens. The effect is one of immersive saturation, where light floods the canvas to the point of near abstraction, tipping the landscape into reverie.

Recurring motifs—water surfaces, explosive skies, hybrid blooms—emerge from long hours spent outdoors and are transformed in the studio into fantastical hues and improbable proportions. In lieu of photographs or direct observation, McAllister uses the experiential traces and sensations of nature, pursuing what he describes as a need to “make it feel like the thing rather than look like it.” His canvases accumulate through small, deliberate marks into dense clearings and skies that lean towards abstraction while retaining their atmospheric charge.

Drawing freely from the legacies of Impressionism and Fauvism, particularly those of Monet, Matisse, and Bonnard, McAllister aims less at representation than at evocation: to conjure the sensation of being absorbed in a landscape rather than to record its image.

The exhibition takes its title from McAllister’s characteristic approach to naming paintings. He likens the multi-word titles to homonyms, capable of shifting meaning depending on where one pauses, conjuring “droplets of feeling” that echo the manifold ways a viewer might enter his work.

sun sundry beguiles wild is accompanied by an essay by Jonah Weiner, which situates this new body of work within McAllister’s trajectory and its ongoing engagement with perception, light, and the ecstatic possibilities of painting.

John McAllister (b. 1973, Louisiana, USA) studied at Art Center College of Design, LA (2007) under the guidance of Mike Kelley and the University of Texas, Austin (1999). He lives and works in Florence, Massachusetts. Recent and forthcoming solo shows include Hagiwara Projects, Japan (2015), Carl Freedman, London (2014), Richard Telles (2015), and Almine Rech (2016). Group exhibitions include L’ALMANACH 14 at Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2014) and American Exuberance at The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida (2011). McAllister’s work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Rubell Family Collection; Miami.