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Tom McGrath's second solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery continues to explore themes of the road and car culture that he initiated in 2002. While a broad tradition of landscape painting informs the work, their true foundation rests upon a fair amount of heady contemporary urban theory, ranging from pop to the apocalyptic. In practice, this means that Mr. McGrath has set himself the task of translating a lot of ideas into his painterly process - no small undertaking. The artist focuses not so much on landscape per se as the observer’s movement through it. He starts with his own experience on the road as his primary visual model: a driver in flight on American highways in our era of satellite broadband. McGrath paints for an audience accustomed to seeing references to pop culture and appropriated imagery in serious art - not the case when Warhol silkscreened newspaper photos of car crashes onto canvas - which is to say that irony is not the point here. The sensibility is wry, but high-minded.Painting from the democratic, almost childlike vantage point of a car passenger seat, the artist uses cool, neutral tones of beige, grey and brown to create an atmosphere of detached melancholy. Tom McGrath's driving landscapes are an investigation not so much of the landscape itself, but rather of our movement through it - and the effect that that movement can have on our environment, both perceptually and culturally. The road, a motif central to a great deal of American music, literature and art, is here employed as a psychological map of the passengers inside, as a metaphor of their running to or from something, or indeed of their not knowing where to go. Tom McGrath's paintings of this period. The composition has been slightly compressed, like a feature film adapted for the small screen. This simple compositional device is a conscious attempt on the part of the artist to free the painting from the realms of the purely pictorial. In an instant, the canvas is no longer a simple window on the world, in the manner that landscapes through the history of art were most often intended to be, but rather a more acute examination of the constructed nature of perception.The artist seems to be posing a question: can today's landscape, an increasingly threatened space consumed by urban sprawl, still provide a romantic, transcendental experience?
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