Thomas McDonell’s Aesthetic of Motion and Impermanence
Installation view of Thomas McDonell: Figueroa St. Paintings. Courtesy of EUROPA, New York.
Like a sea of foamy waves, Thomas McDonell’s exuberant paintings luxuriate with long, drawn-out finger marks. Relinquishing the mediation of paint brushes that imbue facades with orchestrated sophistication, the artist reconsolidates the artfulness of an innocent yet visceral approach to mark-making. Pigment, canvas, and skin make contact and contort into an aesthetic of impermanence. I recall those chilly, dewy mornings in my childhood when I’d drag my fingers across the inside of the car window, inadvertently creating automatic drawings guided by a state of total unawareness. Stick figures, smiley faces, cat silhouettes. Houses, hearts, cursive letters. When the taxi driver decided to roll down the window, everything vanished. Nothing, fortunately, insisted on its symbolic function or importance.
In The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art (1957), art historian Meyer Schapiro remarks: “The work of art is an ordered world of its own kind in which we are aware, at every point, of its becoming.” Action painting, in its spontaneity, offers a glimpse of this “coming to be”—smudges, drizzles, physical proximity, and erasure. Marks alone, rather than representation, evidence and make public the processes often performed in solitude. At EUROPA Gallery, Thomas McDonell’s solo exhibition, Figueroa St. Paintings, offers a display of painterly bravura that embodies precisely this charm.
McDonell has a penchant for social practice and art historical references. He deploys an economy of means—“art-by-limitation,” working with repurposed materials like donated mistint house paint. The durable, hard, and glossy finish of urethane alkyd enamel lends solid physicality to the otherwise boundless inflation of space. The larger paintings are misty and atmospheric, seducing the viewer with their sublimity, while the smaller pieces, motion-filled and turbulent, electrify the pristine and secluded gallery space through an autographic impulse. My eyes endeavor to derive meaning from a cacophony of gestures. They conjure up heart-shaped balloons, mountain-like triangles, and a glorious rye field.
Installation view of Thomas McDonell: Figueroa St. Paintings. Courtesy of EUROPA, New York.
At the center of each room, ceramic vases and stacks of newspaper rolls form furniture-like sculptures with a functional undertone. Bundles of newsprint are gleaned from vendors at the Los Angeles Flower Market. These makeshift table tops read events, headlines, and advertisements from 2023, many of them written in Korean. McDonell notes the decreasing availability of litho-printed newspapers and their subsequent association with the archival: “Newpaper says, time.” Inherent in these first drafts of history is a subtext of aging, echoed by the cut flowers, in cycles of bloom and decay, that accompany the hand-crafted vases incised with calligraphy-adjacent patterns.
Installation view of Thomas McDonell: Figueroa St. Paintings. Courtesy of EUROPA, New York.
Textured by the old-soul historicity of abstract expressionism, McDonell’s intuitive works make room for repose and meditation. These deeply personal but stylistically anonymous paintings, somewhat detached from New York’s disorienting September bustle, tap into a kind of innateness. In haze and in lost time, field of vision suddenly becomes immense.
Thomas McDonell: Figueroa St. Paintings was on view at EUROPA, New York, from September 4th to October 13, 2024.
