Todd McKie : Decent Paintings

November 9—December 13 at Gallery NAGA

2007 crests and concludes with new paintings by Todd McKie, whose apparently simple figures presented in putatively amusing situations are actually anything but simple.  Their silhouette–like flatness and meanderingly irregular outlines pop them forward like children’s images, and that’s one of the sources, along with tribal art, evoked by McKie’s calculated and laboriously developed scenarios.

Todd McKie: Decent Paintings runs from November 9 through December 13.  A reception for the artist and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, November 9 from 6 to 8 pm.  Images of the works in the show can be seen at gallerynaga.com.

A widely exhibited painter for the past thirty years, McKie has always made paintings that engage with vivacity and wit.  Some of his newest work is narratively enigmatic; Fruit Bowl features a half-purple, half-brown figure whose smoking pipe grows out of its face.  The primary development in the new paintings is in their backgrounds, which have moved from flat scrims of color to vibrant abstractions, theaters of color in which his protagonists are set.  And by painting his figures in hues that contrast with their backgrounds, the characters and their settings both leap toward us in surges of charged color.

“People say I’m a colorist,” McKie remarks.  “I’m fascinated by it.  My standards about what I want to be happening, color to color, are pretty demanding.  That’s one way in which I’ve changed as a painter.  It pretty much has to be right.  I’m trying mostly to amuse myself and wreak pleasure out of the process, which I do.”