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Central Station (2009)
homepage/cmc_central_station.jpgMany of the new paintings emphasize the quest to find ways of living that encourage human connection and solidarity, rather than broken tracks leading to urbanization, sprawl and isolation. Within the fire I find both beauty and destruction, transformation and memory.
(Artist's Statement) -
Particles (2003)
homepage/cmc_particles_01.jpgChristian McLeod is a painter who is completely secure in his own skin, not duped by art-world fetishizing of the new and confusing of the new with the important. He is aware of his forebearers, including a particular call on his soul of both the Canadian landscape tradition, the Canadian (perhaps primarily Québécois) abstract tradition, and also Aboriginal traditions. In any given work, he may be in conversation with Canadian artistic ancestors like a Riopelle, a Borduas (so brilliantly echoed while arguably being surpassed in McLeod's "Particles" series paintings), a Thompson, a Morriseau, or a Jackson. But his influences cannot but be - and are - global...
(Craig Scott) -
Going Home (2005)
homepage/cmc_going_home.jpgHe marks the outlines of the territories we now occupy - city spaces crammed with cars and pedestrians, dizzying views from atop tall buildings, rave kids huddled in the corner of a vacant warehouse, glimpses from cars blazing through landscapes blurred by speed. Everything is moving, all the time. Often building on a shaky grid, McLeod combines the formal structure of a certain type of abstraction (Klee, Mondrian, Hundertwasser) with the lyricism of Expressionism, but never veers completely into abstract expressionism - one viewer called it abstract realism, but I'd be more inclined toward realist abstraction.
(Martin Mills) -
Passing Over (2008)
homepage/cmc_passing_over_SM.jpgPassing Over (2008) has a series of repeating and interlocuted grid-like pattern imprints in black build a jumble of impressions while tachiste-like patches of red, with more subtle whites build a jumble of effects. Some of these effects are "imprinted" as if on a map, while still others have been "placed" onto the surface, as a build up of painterly gestures. This painting is almost like a reconnaissance image of the earth seen from above, but it is also suggestive of bombing, of a dense impacting on that surface/map. We see it from above, looking downwards. We can visualize this painting as either pure abstraction or alternatively as visual metaphorical "map".
(John K. Grande) -
Further Unmanned Strategies (2007)
homepage/cmc_fus_SM.jpgBiblical plagues of insects morph into drones, buzzing through the city, recording everything in their wake. The war machines come home. After their efficacy is proven in Iraq and Afghanistan, the logic of capital dictates that these technologies be utilized in "new markets" - that is, our back yards. The unmanned predators that dot the skies over Baghdad are advancing on London; it is just a matter of time... He walks through the city, observing and being observed, leaving a shadowy presence in grainy images written twenty-four times a second to hard drives held in a secure, undisclosed location.
(Martin Mills) -
Unmanned (2006)
homepage/cmc_unmanned.jpgUnmanned - an apocalyptic, or perhaps pre-apocalyptic, painting built upon an unsettling, destabilizing and (therefore) highly exciting arena in which a painterly red field is made to hold an arsenal of painterly hot licks - such as those crackling white horizontals that snap through the picture's surface... [T]he presence, in the lower half of the red field, of a sudden infestation into the proceedings of tiny shapes, rather like bow-ties, which, because they appear to float on the picture's surface, initially seem moth-like or bat-like. A moment's inspection of these dark, winged forms soon reveals, however, that they are really far more mechanical than they are creaturely. Indeed they appear to be drones. Listening devices. Satellites. Eternally watchful eyes in the sky.
(Gary Michael Dault) -
Reconnaissance (2006)
homepage/cmc_reconnaissance.jpgWe see the strange, boat-like forms that populate his language series - are they the ghosts of ancient methods of communication, or are they the transatlantic cables that enable the world wide web, or the data packets that travel through the cables? He doesn't need to answer that, since the answer is yes and no, simultaneously. In the end, it is his task to embrace uncertainty, to pursue the uncatchable, to feel everything, an unlimited dream. And so his surfaces become immense, swollen with the signs and sounds of our modern world.
(Martin Mills)