C110 review

Gateshead: Elizabeth Magill at BALTIC

In recent years, painting has suffered considerable neglect as a medium for contemporary exhibitions hosted by public galleries. This fact heightens the importance of a solo exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art by Canadian-born Elizabeth Magill, an artist who spent her formative years in Ireland. Not only is this a display of painting, but we also witness investigative image-making by a practitioner with an intense fascination with the medium itself, one who seeks to stretch painting beyond its perceived limits.

It is a minimal exhibition, with only fifteen works sited in the three-room ground-floor gallery. For the most part the artist has executed fragmentary landscapes based on personal recollection and emotional engagement. The paintings are atmospheric and sensory in their use of colour, light, texture and form. Eastern reticence and precision has had an evident impact on Magill's practice. Each individual painting is subjected to a reductive maturation, where the artist captures a subliminal essence in her final vignette. The canvas weave is an integral component, with its surface quality often accentuated. These works become elemental testaments to the beauty and simplicity of a captured moment.

Magill's preference for landscape has its own implicit irony. On one hand she pays tribute to past centuries of production (as in Dark Reflect, clearly influenced by Romanticism and Blossoms I and II, conceived as impressionist exercises); on the other she approaches the genre with an audacious empiricism that has the potential to sacrifice canvas and image in the process. Surfaces are distressed, soaked, dripped, spattered and textured. Magill works with her canvases laid upon the floor and orchestrates the paint upon them from any necessary angle. Not content to function within any confines of genre, medium, palette or representation, her method is thoroughly contemporary.

These enigmatic glimpses of Magill's experience and imagination provide only cryptic clues by way of mundane and generic motifs, as birds and trees dominate. The viewer is left to wonder why the artist will compose a painting entirely of one colour - cadmium red, for instance, to detail roof tops and electric wires in Red prefecture, soft purple tones for a woodland copse in Land of the dusky snow, and pale blue hues to capture air and sky in The full moon over Siberia. These are unexpected colours, suggesting that time and light are paramount and that subject matter is incidental. Yet it is the combination of these elemental forces and the artist's reference points that works in powerful, complementary fusion.

Marianne O'Kane is Curator of Cavanacor Gallery, a writer and critic, and regular contributor to the Irish Arts Review, CIRCA and Perspective.

Elizabeth Magill, Recent Paintings, BALTIC, Gateshead, October / November 2004

Elizabeth Magill, Full moon over Siberia, 2002, oil on canvas; courtesy BALTIC

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.65
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