Feature: Erin McSavaney
FEBRUARY 2024
Mobile Sauna, Shelter Point, acrylic on canvas, 22" X 30"
We are excited to be featuring four stunning new paintings by Erin McSavaney in the gallery.
Erin McSavaney is interested in realistically representing common urban sights that he infuses with a language of abstraction. He does so in order to shorten the space between Photorealism and Hard-Edge painting, modalities that are typically at opposite ends of the spectrum.
South Face, acrylic on canvas, 22" X 30"
McSavaney’s process begins by photo documenting common commercial and residential buildings with their surrounding lawns, parking lots, gardens, fences, or driveways, all the typical adjacencies that are added to create uniqueness to these sites. The structures that attract the artist are ordinary, modern buildings that evoke memories of past events that could have occurred in these spaces: most emanate a mid-20th century aura. Initially, the camera acts as a sketchbook, capturing the detailed information that is categorized in a system of two-dimensional shapes. Once the basic shapes are selected, they literally form the building blocks of the painting, and what follows is an instinctive process of determining which passages of the photograph are essential, and which deviate from an entirely new emerging composition. Hundreds of decisions about what stays, what is eliminated, and what’s added occur in front of the canvas as the overall image is altered and refined. Photography is a useful memory aid for the artist, but the new, highly manipulated images that he paints hover between hyper reality and geometric fiction.
Permanent Vacation, acrylic on canvas, 18" X 24"
McSavaney’s geometric interventions take many forms. Sometimes, these squares, triangles, and other angular shapes index the mid-century era of the building, and at other times, they might reinforce the angle of light and shadow. Still other applications echo, extend, or counter the existing architectural form. Through a long and labour-intensive process, reality and fiction are negotiated across the canvas, juxtaposing the detailed illusion of depth against the flatness of abstracted forms. The typical call-and-response process of abstract painting is utilized here to create pictorial harmony of a very realistic kind. The result is a new space that illuminates the relationship between representational and abstract painting, and the parallels of how they are constructed, where each action demands a reaction.
McSavaney’s deliberate process of virtually disassembling three-dimensional objects and rebuilding them in two-dimensional space with the addition of stand-in geometries, offers insights into his perceptions of the world. From his viewpoint, the purity of an architectural vision is always corrupted by the resulting behaviours of people using the buildings.
Spaghetti Squash with Triangles, acrylic on canvas, 18" X 24"