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The Grey Gallery Presents Jock McFadyen The landscape with its clothes on March 15th - April 22nd 2010 Viewing by appointment only Let’s propose that Jock McFadyen is a history painter, that once elevated but now maligned painting genre. And not just one of the few but, perhaps, one of the UK’s leading history painters, focused on the conflicting rhythms of the city, its growth, decay and rebirth. McFadyen’s urban paintings have a distinct loci. He has made memorial works of Berlin, New york, Belfast and Edinburgh, but it is to London’s East End, where he has lived and worked for the last 30 years, that he returns. The geography of his paintings reaches from the edge of the City, where decaying buildings of the East End rub up against the towers of Capital, past the aspirant Canary Wharf to the sprawling estuarial plain, to the flats of Dagenham now emptied of industry, and up into the Lea Valley, being rebuilt before our eyes with Olympian zeal. The architectural flux of London, its constant evolution, finds parallel in the artist’s use of allegory; the flow of the Thames, the stasis of the canal network and the anticipatory mobility of the A13. Someone once wrote that McFadyen was a painter of human unfreedom - but rather than being confined, there is a sense of the salvatory journey implicit in his work. McFadyen may look sympathetically, not to Baudelaire’s 19th Century flaneurs who delighted in the banality of the urban life, but at their 20th Century filmic equivalents, the lone wanderers who populate the films of Wenders and Antonioni, pessimistic yet striving. Film also gives McFadyen a key schematic device; the cinematic format of his large-scale canvases. Cinema-scope and a distinct horizon line give the artist space to paint the sky - sometimes dark, often overcast but never dazzling - and to tackle what Turner identified as the true subject of painting - Light. Words by Nigel Frank
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