NYAB Event - John McAllister "Much Pretty Reverie"

John McAllister "Much Pretty Reverie"

James Fuentes LLC

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James Fuentes presents John McAllister's solo exhibition of paintings, Much Pretty Reverie.

Sparked by the Wallace Stevens poem Of Mere Being and a simultaneous fixation on images of Bonnard in his studio "Where the walls were a haphazard jumble of flakes of paper, ephemera, postcards, prints and unstretched paintings," McAllister subsequently sought to celebrate the mood that the poem and those images evoked in this recent body of work. McAllister achieves this by employing strategies from a disparate range of painting dialectics with an entirely fresh approach. By tackling these "paintings within paintings" through an unselfconscious exploration of color, illusion and facsimile these works speak to their own inherent qualities.

As the artist Richard Hawkins writes, "My guess is that most viewers are going to be too embarrassed to appreciate your paintings. Your newest ones are too detached from the topicality that serves as a comfort zone for most... too colorful in this strange world where colorlessness too often signiﬁes seriousness and smartness." The full text "A note to John McAllister" below.

John McAlister is a 2007 MFA graduate from the Art Center College of design and a 2007 John Mitchell Foundation grant recipient. McAllister has participated in recent group exhibitions at Sister/Cottage Home (Los Angeles), the Cue Art Foundation (New York), and the Glendale College Art Gallery (Glendale). He was born in Slidell, Louisiana and is based in Los Angeles, CA.

[Imaga: John McAllister "After Dark Geranium" (2010) Oil on canvas, 19 x 17in. ]