John McNamara: A Survey of Paintings by Gallery Bergelli

JOHN MCNAMARA A Survey of Paintings

John McNamara has exhibited widely and teaches in the Art Practice department at

UC Berkeley. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Currier Museum of Art, Danforth Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, Fuller Museum of Art, J.B. Speed Museum of Art, MIT List Visual Art Center, Rose Art Museum, Smith College of Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Davis Museum and Cultural Center and the Worcester Art Museum to name but a few. He is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Grants (1980, 1983, 1986, 1989); Awards in the Visual Arts Fellowship 2, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art; and the MacDowell Colony Fellowship.

John McNamara: A Survey of Paintings February 10 – March 7, 2012 Reception: February 10, 5:30 – 7:30pm Artist Talk: February 10 at 6:30pm Artist Talk: During the Opening Reception McNamara is giving an artist question and answer presentation. Some of the topics of discussion will deal with how he develops the points of departure for his work, why photography has been an integral facet in his painting throughout his career, and what it means for him as an artist to talk about investigation within the painting process. The artist will also talk more specifically about the entire process of making a painting, the creative process if you will. This is meant to be an interactive presentation, so we look forward to your questions and observations.

Cover: Wise Ass, oil, paper on panel, 20”x30”

Essay: DeWitt Cheng

483 Magnolia Avenue, Larkspur, CA 94939, www.bergelli.com, 415-945-9454

Gallery Bergelli features contemporary paintings and sculptures done by national and international artists. It presents work that is both visually exciting and technically strong in a unique and inviting space.

“Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from paint, mixing not only figuration and abstraction, the weather and exposing them to the critic.” but also raising questions about representation in -Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary the way that many photographers of constructed realities are also doing. “… In this empire the art of cartography had reached such a perfection that a map of a single McNamara is a painter, however, who has excounty covered a whole city, and a map of the em- plored the creation of presence, or “sense of pire that of a whole county. Finally, a point was place” in painting for his entire career. A Bostoreached when these colossal maps were no lon- nian trained at Massachusetts College of Art, he ger considered satisfactory, and the institutions initially painted turbulent Abstract Expressionist of the cartographers made a map of the empire, fields inset with stylized, totemic figures and rectwhich was as large as the empire itself and co- angular apertures: sketches or photographs sugincided with it point for point. Later generations, gestive of windows or electronic displays. The who were less prone to practice the art of car- free-association imagery (Marilyn, animal skulls, tography, came to realize that this vast map was feet, lips, Einstein, daguerreotypes, Cary Grant) useless and through some neglect abandoned it was evocative, but ambiguous, defying narrative, to the forces of sun and winters. In the deserts or, rather, suggesting multiple narratives, with an of the western regions [of the empire], home to implied reality lying beneath the welters of brushbeasts and beggars, there remained dispersed strokes (“I have always loved the tiny mark.”). In ruins of the map, but otherwise there were no re- 1982, the Boston Phoenix critic Kenneth Baker mains of the practice of geography in the whole (now art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle) land.” -Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Sci- praised the works’ implied “presence of reality,” ence or “the impression of inexhaustibility that defines reality.” McNamara’s “meandering composition[s] It’s hard to imagine now, but only two genera- ... present you with more than anyone’s memory tions ago, abstraction and figuration were locked can hold in the way of physical structure and in mortal combat. (The accusations of treachery color interaction.” In 1986, The Christian Science that greeted Philip Guston’s 1970s abandonment Monitor’s Theodore Wolff admired the paintings’ of abstraction for his late, figurative style should “highly personal and provocative fusion of geobe required reading for impassioned art revolu- metric and organic forms, their ability to objectify tionaries.) Esthetic fashions come and go, but primal experience, and their knack of maintainsome, if not all, of the best art has always sought ing a dynamic, contrapuntal relationship between to capture the world of appearances and to ex- the products of impulse and those of calculation.” amine it in some transcendent light, sub specie Prestigious art fellowships (AVA, NEA) followed, aeternitatis: to show flux and eternity fused. John as did articles in art magazines (Art News, ArtfoMcNamara makes surrealist photocollages and rum) and purchases by major art museums (Metthen slowly covers with them with a layer of oil ropolitan Museum; List Visual Art Center, M.I.T.;

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In 1993, McNamara moved to the Bay Area, teaching first at San Francisco Art Institute and later the University of California at Berkeley, where his courses in drawing, painting, and Visual Studies, along with his mentoring of graduate-student instructors, continue, both popular and academically well regarded.

admires the complex urban landscapes of Richard Estes-crossed with conceptual performance and ritual, the painting being the end product of his focused attention, even compulsion. “Total fixation activity-I admire that tremendously,” he says, of the paintings of Beat painter/collagist Jess Collins. “Obsessive, crazy - I have total respect.”

Despite such success, however, by 1989, McNamara felt the need for creative change: “the paintings had less and less meaning for me.” After a five-month hiatus from painting, he decided to “make narratives,” by incorporating photographic and other found imagery-”life’s realities”-into his paintings. The commandeering of pre-existing, “low,” vernacular material for “high” art derives from Cubist and Dadaist collage, developing with Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s hybrid 2D/3D artworks and Pop Art’s mass-media image appropriations. McNamara continues this rich tradition by assembling printed images from magazines and other sources. Instead of presenting the works as is, however, or re-photographing them (or composing them in the computer), McNamara repaints the images in oils, preserving the source material in idealized, unchanging form, atop the original material. His unorthodox practice is analogous to, say, decorating mummy cases with encaustic portraits of upwardly mobile dead Egyptians, or making a 1:1-scale map of the topography underfoot, as in Borges’ story quoted above. McNamara, fascinated with combining photographic frozen moments from different eras and areas, and preserving them in the amber of art, writes: “For me, collage is a time machine of sorts. The painted skin on top jettisons the photo document into the world of painting; but these people, places and things still speak from underneath the painted skin.” The artist thus practices a kind of Photorealist painting-he particularly

Some of McNamara’s eye-popping obsessivecompulsive covers or coverlets include “Wise Ass,” a panoramic landscape reminiscent of Dali in its succulent palette and unfettered fantasy; “Encroachment,” a merger of two images of high-altitude maintenance workers in New York City and Dallas; “The Suitors,” depicting a Gothic Revival mansion and its upstart neighbor, a postmodernist work in progress “Unreal,” a montage of children, wounded soldiers and movie spectators with the epic quality of nineteen-century history painting, but without its canned sentiments; and “White on Color,” a large painting combining scores of images dealing with various types of “space” that have been edited with white paint and then preserved and muted by an overall glazing of white-tinted wax, resulting in a kind of artifact already dimmed and obscured by time. Social satire, surrealist fantasy and elegy vie with formal concerns in these works, but however ambiguous or enigmatic the narrative implications, the images are always compelling to viewers open to their eccentric seductions. With their surreal juxtapositions and cinematic jump cuts, they are, in the words of Gerrit Henry (Art in America), “ridiculous and sublime, all at once”-like real life. ~ DeWitt Cheng

Wise Ass, oil, paper on panel, 20”x30”

Tug of War, oil, paper on panel, 24”x48”

Empathy, oil, paper on panel, 30”x20”

The Art World, oil, paper on panel, 24”x18”

Beauty and The Beast, oil, paper on panel, 18”x24”

Obsession, oil, paper on panel, 18”x24”

The Flow, oil, paper on panel, 24”x48”

The Conservator, oil, paper on panel, 24”x48”

Climbing, oil, paper on panel, 18”x24”

Encroachment, oil, paper on panel, 18”x24”

Futility, oil, paper on panel, 20”x30”

Unreal, oil, paper on panel, 20”x30”

Suitors, oil, paper on panel, 20”x30”

White On Color, oil, paper on panel, 60”x48”