C103 Review

Armagh and Belfast: Terry McAllister at Market Place and Queen's Street Studios

Terry McAllister: Still (detail), charcoal on paper mounted on foamex, 200 cm x 600 cm

Four large black-and-white drawings of clouds form the centrepiece of both shows. The show in the Market Place includes a piece which consists of one hundred and twenty, initially identical-looking paintings of a viaduct which is depicted in closely related tones, and six drawings of brick walls. The show in Queen's Street is exclusively of black-and-white drawings and includes drawings of wallpaper.

These works contribute subtly but significantly to the body of work that operates in that space of resonance between a postminimalist sensibility and a tight, resolutely representational art. Both these modes deny (or appear to deny) the tension between the reality of the art object and the object depicted, a tension that so propelled modernism. Often, too, these modes deny the artist's presence, appealing to a supposed objectivity, either empirical or rational, or both.

In McAllister's work neither modernism nor the artist's presence are wholly denied. The paintings in Armagh show work with the (highly aesthetic) resolution of the abstract/mimetic tension, in the vein of artists such as Whistler or Paul Henry; i.e., that closely related tones can read both as highly mimetic and as pleasing abstract patterning. McAllister's use of the familiar but effective device of repetition is what introduces a reference to minimalism and to concerns surrounding uniqueness, authorship and originality. McAllister makes the use of the device his own through the commitment of the hand-made element; each piece is different - underpainting, sensitive handling, colouring and all.

The implications of this approach are carried over to the black and white pieces, where patterning/representational tension is replaced by the dada/representational resonance. Yet the mood remains highly aesthetic, and handcrafted. McAllister has covered his surfaces with an attractively rough charcoal ground and then drawn into this ground by rubbing the paler bits from the dark. The result asserts beauty - the clouds, though drawn, feel like they have been painted, the black and white feels like the harmony of two colours rather than the contrast of one tone on the ground of another. The choice of wallpaper as subject matter offers no element of spatial recession, and what visual interest it does offer is, of course, self-evidently appropriated from the designer. This attitude is then extended to the clouds which have the possibility of being read as either banal or beautiful. If the subject matter of clouds teases the viewer to read these works as being in the tradition of romantic painting, the coolness disallows this. More significantly, the evocation of opulence distances these pieces from the apparently similar photorealist clouds painted by Richter.

Claims at objectivity are not made here, as they would be with less aesthetic, less hand-crafted work, because of course, objectivity may not exist. What does exist, of course, is the artist's temporal activity, i.e., the process. What impresses is not so much McAllister's skill as his obsessiveness.

McAllister's aesthetic detachment holds up craft, beauty, labour and patience as bereft of given value but persistent to the point of inevitability.

Tony Bartley is an artist based in Belfast.

Terry McAllister: Still, Market Place, Armagh, October 2002

Terry McAllister: Sample, Queen's Street Studios, Belfast

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