David McClyment

Abundance: recent painting

September 6 – October 1, 2006

Abundance: Spit, Chew, Swallow.

“Abundance” explores food related imagery and the “politics” of food. These paintings use the seductive gloss of food “porn” sources like Gourmet or the LCBO magazines as starting off points. The images are meant to be media representations of food – a parody of the real thing. The “reality” of the pitted and distressed surfaces contradicts the appeal of polished settings and saturated colours. There is a comfortable, familiar feeling to these images. Yet they never resolve into anything truly recognizable. Being undefinable, they remain unattainable.

Format

As with all McClyment’s recent exhibitions, Abundance continues his exploration of narrative structure, exposition or just plain story telling. Pairs of paintings telling a story to each other – but not through a conventional linear narrative structure (i.e. left to right). The story folds out from the gap between the panels, or falls in from the edges. In this dynamic, the specific imagery is not the sole consideration of the “story”. Rather, it is how the story is told. Within each set of panels, McClyment deliberately juxtaposes seemingly contradictory imagery. Formal visual structures, such as patterns of dots, colour, or paint strokes, link otherwise disparate panels. It is this tension between a natural centrifugal impulse and the urge to establish a connection that becomes the “story”.

Process

McClyment always thinks of painting in terms of process: repeated layers of colour and imagery. Over the years he has evolved a rather idiosyncratic technique of working with stencils and enamel paints on prepared plywood. Gouged, sanded, and tattooed with fleeting marks, the surviving surfaces appear much like bruised flesh. Working with a belt sander as much as a paintbrush, he enjoys the struggle revealed by the visible stratification of layers. The resulting palimpsest of stenciled imagery, ciphers and texture trace the ebb and flow of each work’s development.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL September 8, 2006 page R22

Gary Michael Dault

David McClyment’s All You Can Eat: You Know You Want It

David McClyment calls his new exhibition Abundance. Given the fact that the abundance he’s alluding to in these dashing, exuberant paintings is about the opulent, over-the-top-ness of media-generated foodstuffs — what McClyment refers to as “food porn” –it’s possible that Overabundance might have served him even better as a title.

McClyment’s previous exhibition was called As Seen on TV, and involved what he describes as his “expressionistic processing of media images into paint.” For this exhibition, at the David Kaye Gallery, he has become a food processor.

“It was the photographs of food in magazines like Gourmet and that lavish LCBO magazine that did it,” McClyment tells me on the phone from his studio. “The more I looked at them, the more unattainable the images became. The more I examined these carefully cosmeticized foods, the more unrecognizable they seemed. In the end, I began wondering if such foods ever really existed at all.”

As food chimeras, as culinary objects of desire, the pinup foods in the magazines and on TV are, of course, highly abstracted. Which seemed reason enough, McClyment tells me, to abstract them further — and in his own way.

His own way involves a torturous regimen whereby his subjects (fruits, sandwiches, pies, cupcakes) are drawn on paper, cut out and made into stencils, spray-painted onto prepared plywood panels — and often, in the course of a painting’s evolution, sanded off again (he uses a belt sander as often as he uses a brush) and restencilled, gouged, distressed, worried and harried until . . . well, until things are done.

All this means that the food objects in a McClyment painting are normally rich, lush and burning with deep, incendiary colours. It was no little surprise, then, to discover among the riotous blare of his other food works, three stern, rather iconic pieces in black and cream — two paintings of ice cream cones (All You Can Eat: You Know You Want Itand All You Can Eat: It’s Good For You), and a painting of a solitary chocolate broken in half, its vital fluids leaking out into the surrounding black space (All You Can Eat: Cream Filled Centre).

Where did these rather severe, emblematic paintings come from? Well, in the case of the ice cream cones — one of which is reproduced here — McClyment fancied himself a kid again and posed himself a serious, if kid-like question: What would the world’s absolutely best possible, most luscious, most over-the-top ice cream cone look like?

His dream-cone came dutifully to mind. It was gigantic, and its cone was so bulging with its burden of ice cream that it was sort of stretched and distorted into its present fruit-basket shape, its payload of ice cream now a kind of glittering array of ice-creamy moments — a bursting out of ice cream jewels from an edible treasure chest.

“It’s strange to encounter these rather restrained, black-and-cream paintings in the midst of all the other hot, thronging foods in colour,” I say. “Yes,” McClyment admits. “It was strange for me too.”

I compliment him on the elegance of these stark, authoritative paintings and on the beauty of their drawing (or rather stencilling). “But why did you do it?” I ask him. He comes up with a brilliant explanation: “It was almost like taking an X-ray of the food,” he says. Then he adds this endearing procedural pun: “I guess it was like cleansing the palette.”