 Untitled (Yellow stripe), 2004 Oil on canvas, 155 x 244 cm, 61 x 96 inches Tom McGrath The paintings of Tom McGrath, a young American artist, insert themselves within the consolidated pictorial tradition of American Landscape which includes artists of the Hudson School such as Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Jasper Cropsey. These artists painted the Hudson River and its picturesque corners not only to celebrate an aesthetic ideal, but also to renew pictorial language. Tom McGrath is equally interested in the anatomy of visual data and aesthetic seduction, even though his works are the witnesses of his serious talent and strong technical skills. His object of inquiry is the American landscape, that is, the United States in its most extreme modernity. His subjects thus range from traffic on a highway with a WalMart truck in the foreground to a motel in Memphis and the overwhelming towers in Harlem. These are the fragments which he uses to narrate America and to capture it in its everyday moments. In his first series of paintings, presented in New York in 2002, McGrath observed the United States through the windows of a car in the rain. It was his way of describing America with elegant intimacy and at the same time was an expression of a different point-of-view. The veil of water became a deforming lens which allowed the artist to reinterpret the landscape: an instrument to deconstruct painting and analyze the brushstroke in its most synthetic qualities. The result was a vision of the whole which was at the same time clear and yet distorted. In his new series of paintings, presented with this show at the Galleria Lia Rumma, the artist experiences the landscape as a personal and intimate language. Only a vague memory remains from the objective data and the space becomes dreamlike, imaginative, and emotional at the same time. In "Nashvillle Skyline", for instance, Tom McGrath challenges the viewer's perception, forcing him to abandon his usual understanding of vision and to reconstruct an identity for a space which is completely surreal. It would be a mistake to strictly associate the artist's work with the photographic image, especially in light of how the latter has been structured in the last twenty years. If the idea of the photograph is present in the work, it is only as a document of life, a reproduction of an image, a snapshot of the moment. Exhibition: May 28 - July 16, 2004 Gallery hours: Wed-Fri 4:30 - 7:30 pm Galleria Lia Rumma Via Vannella Gaetani, 12 I-80121 Naples Telephon +39 081 764 36 19 Fax +39 081 764 42 13 Email liarumma@tin.it |
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