John McLean

New Works

20 April - 26 May 2007

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L' Éventail, 2007, acrylic on paper, 77 x 57.5cm

A John McLean painting is, he has said, “a song to colour”. He has love affairs with colours.
A light yellow will appear, subtly modified, in painting after painting until he is tired of her.
He falls for a range of blues and dallies with every red from brown through cadmium red
to purple. Each assignation is a new sensual surprise. He has bags of technique but likes to
be spontaneous, glazing one colour with a lighter, another with a darker one, letting the
bright white gesso gleam through one and shine round the edge of another. If he wants her
to shine brightly, he will feed her with Golden’s ‘Iridescent Pearl’; if he wants something to
get his hands on she eats coarse pumice gel or fine if it’s just for a light touch. Each new
colour can be solid or diaphanous, iridescent or matt.

He lays down the law though. Colour, to be colour, must have a shape. He prefers them
simple: that way they can be more nuanced, and universal: that way they are never boring.
There is a distinct taste for curvy ones but he straightens them out from time to time.
Although they swing round the paintings in joyous abandon, there is a hidden structure.
Point reaches out to point, one edge continues the arc of another, though some float free.
One arc will set the spiral in motion; another will seem to hold it up. An edge can be hard
and sharp, another soft and yielding. There is movement but also counter-movement as in
the best music. He loves fabric, always shows it off and sticks more on if he wants to really
feel the warp and weft. He likes to appear flat but the shapes transform into surfaces diving
below or rising above each other as their curves and colours dictate. But every clear
statement becomes deliciously fluid and ambiguous as in all affairs of the heart.

Stasera, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 220 x 159cm

Very recently, this year, he has sent all the complex shapes packing, especially those which
pretended they might be something more than they were – a fish, a crown, a crescent moon
etc -and just had a threesome with the triangle and the quadrilateral; they were anyway
always at the root of everything, even if sometimes a little warped. These two, in many
colours and with many glazes and loose brushwork and all the other tricks they had learnt,
have come together to make one complex, ambiguous space rather than showing off by
individually flying around the space of the earlier pictures. They join at their vertices
although sometimes they deliberately and cheekily just miss or are cut across before they
can complete themselves. They can be sharp but sometimes they are “snubbed off”. “David
Smith used to grind his corners,” he said mischievously when I asked him about this.

A hint of discreet baroque curtains seems to frame the space of this group of paintings –
Fête Étoilé, Balmirmer, Cygne Chimérique, Au Miroir and Stasera, even in the case of
Balmirmer blowing right across it. In 1988, in “The Guardian”, Tim Hilton identified an
image of ‘display’ in McLean’s work which went back in European painting at least as far as
Titian, with a central image displayed between curtains. In 1994,Martha Kapos, in her
catalogue essay for the Talbot Rice Gallery, referred back to Hilton’s article and pointed to
The National Gallery of Scotland’s Titian, Diana and Actaeon, long known and loved by
McLean, “where the curtains are flung aside and the hunter Actaeon catches sight of the
forbidden image of the Goddess Diana, naked at her bath.” She adds that the painting
condenses two great themes: painting as visual spectacle and as erotic fantasy – both
continued abstractly by McLean.

Thurible, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 160 x 89cm

His return, even more explicitly than earlier, to this discreetly curtained erotic spectacle
illustrates that not only does he paint spiral compositions but that his development as an
artist has a spiral form. He circles back over problems and ideas in painting but each time
he does so he has moved forward and the results are ever new. Whenever one visits his
studio one sees painterly thinking all around. He is constantly developing ideas. In art he is
a hunter like Actaeon; he too is after the goddess, and although for us the result is painterly
spectacle and erotic bliss, he often feels like Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own dogs.

The large masterpiece Stasera has a white quadrilateral displayed in its centre and inside it
another quadrilateral split into two triangles. The idea of the composition may have been
worked out in the little collage Winnock only rotated through 90°. I don’t mean that the
smaller painting was a study for the larger, only that one idea gives rise to another. Splitting
the quadrilateral into two triangles that don’t quite join gives the shape an added dynamic.
The white quadrilateral is displayed within an orange space. This orange seems to me like a
cloth suspended by its four corners from the edges of the painting and I am reminded that
the curtain in the Diana and Actaeon is not at the side of the painting but is suspended in
the middle from a thin line absurdly like a washing line. A nymph twists it into a spiral.
There is something quite comic about this washing line and a curtain that can’t really hide
anything – least of all a substantial troop of naked nymphs and a Goddess.

Nocturne, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 120cm

McLean’s ‘curtain’ paintings seem to have come to an end for the moment. The new ones
are a development of the most recent works on paper; Swee Crook, Tapsalteerie and Tam
Tram have a quadrilateral of colour at each corner, leaving a propeller-like shape of black in
which there is either a diamond shape or a diamond split dynamically into two triangles. The
corner quadrilaterals seem to continue beyond the edges of the paintings, implying a much
larger space. These three were themselves a development of L’Éventail and Après un Rêve.
This windmill-like space is developed in three new paintings which, though derived from
the ‘curtain’ paintings and with the split diamond of Stasera in the middle, take his work
into a new area. In the works on paper the propeller is black and the luminescence of the
colours is like paper lanterns at night. The propeller in two of the paintings on canvas is a
luminous rich brown and as expansive and embracing as a summer day.

I have long pondered the sensation of movement in John McLean’s paintings. One
comparison I might make is to the movement of the moon. Sitting outside on a summer
moonlit night, looking up, the moon seems still. It hangs weightless over the world pouring
its light softly over us. Looking up half an hour later it has moved. One becomes conscious
of its arc in the heavens. The movement in John’s paintings is like this; the shapes are still
but they are about to move – next look they may have moved. They make me think of lines
by Leopardi, the great Italian poet of the moon:
O cara luna, al cui tranquillo raggio
Danzan le lepri nelle selve…
(O cherished moon, beneath whose quiet beams
The hares dance in the woods…)
Both the quiet movement of the moon and the dancing hares are in John’s paintings.

Cleugh, 2007, mixed media on canvas, 30 x 60cm

Lightness is one of the great values in John McLean’s painting and it links his work not
only with the painters he admires – Matisse, Miró, Jack Bush, Sandra Blow, Bill Perehudoff
– but also with a great range of European art, literature and music. When Don Quixote
drives his lance into the sail of the windmill and is carried round up aloft, it may take only
a few lines in Cervantes’ great novel but it has remained evermore in the European
consciousness as a supreme comic moment.

Milan Kundera in “The Curtain”, his new book of essays on the novel (published in English
just a few weeks ago), says that a transforming experience in the life of any serious novelist
is when feeling “separated from himself, he suddenly sees that self from a distance,
astonished to find that he is not the person he thought he was. After that experience, he will
know that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal,
elementary, and that it casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical.”

Acrobat, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 50cm

At first sight a John McLean painting appears clear and simple. But the more one looks at it
the more complex and mysterious it becomes. It seems initially playful and casual but
gradually a strong structure emerges. This structure does not however tie it down, nor
remove the playfulness. One is conscious of the canvas or paper surface but also of a
turning and movement in space. We become aware, while looking at his painting, that our
visual perceptions are highly ambiguous and that the painting, and by extension the world,
is stranger and more mysterious than we thought and that we are stranger than we thought
too. He reveals our inner perceptual world bathed in “the soft gleam of the comical”.

I previously compared the contradictory movement and stillness of the paintings to the
movement of the moon. I would add to that the movement of our inner world, our
consciousness. We tend to think that we are always the same person and our mental state is
stable, but it shifts all the time; often we do not know why one thought or emotion
succeeds another and of course we used to hold the moon responsible if our mental state
became too mobile.

Fête, 2007, acrylic on paper, 57.5 x 77cm

Kundera says that there is “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world.
Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened
before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” At the moment of our
birth, he says, the world rushes towards us already made-up, masked, re-interpreted. This
curtain is not entirely different from the one in Diana and Actaeon. The curtain there hid
the perfect huntress from the hunter. When it was torn away he saw her clearly and nakedly.
Kundera’s torn curtain removes the prejudices and pre-interpretations of the world and
allows us to see the world and ourselves as different from what we imagined. The curtain is
always re-formed – it has always to be torn or drawn back anew so that we can see afresh in
the soft gleam of the comical. This is what McLean’s painting can do for us if we pay
attention to it.

One day John and I were talking in his studio about Auden’s centenary. I was saying that I
think he is the same generous kind of artist that Auden was. They both disguise their hard
work with a mastery of technique and a sense of ease and in both cases it is the
consciousness of mortal frailty that underlies the optimism of their art. He quoted to me a
very ribald Neapolitan lyric he had found in Auden’s commonplace book “A Certain
World” and told me that he got seriously told off for trying to use such language in his
Italian class.

Rabelais (with Cervantes) is Kundera’s twin progenitor of the European novel and John
McLean’s Rabelaisian side confirms me in my view of him as a painter in Kundera’s
European comic tradition – that is alongside being the greatest living British colourist.

Chris Yetton

John McLean was born in 1939. He attended the University of St. Andrews and the Courtauld Institute in London. McLean lives and works in London. This will be his first solo exhibition at Broadbent.