Ewan McNeil’s practice incorporates photography, painting, collage and sculpture. His aesthetic process is a continuous search for reconsideration and adaption. He seeks functional resolutions to visual and design consideration, be they paintings or the design and construction of the easel on which the paintings are made.
His black and white acrylic paintings of our urban and manufactured environments are directly stated, usually presenting appearances from one, unified, fixed point of view. The subject of these compositions is often of a building or a landscape in a state of change. Star of David shows a house in the midst of being stripped apart and remodelled. This image speaks of a state of constant flux and becoming. The only constant is change.
One of my personal favourites is Edi Flats, a view of the back of the Scottish National Museum. This painting shows a riot of conflicting aesthetics from one fixed point of view. McNeil’s achromatic paintings embody a spare beauty that is utterly unsentimental. Several observers have commented on the film noir associations these images provoke.
While the paintings often depict scenes of symbolic disjuncture, they are nevertheless formally unified to the point of visual elegance. The unity of the fixed point of perception in tandem with the compositional balance stands in contrast to the subjects in the paintings. The sculptures function differently. The actual forms of the sculpture embrace a sort of random dissonance. But rather than ‘represent’ dissonance, they embrace a sense of disjunction through form. The sculptures also have unity and balance, but this balance is precarious and conditional. There is a delicate and poignant sense that things are standing in relation to each other and could fall apart.
McNeil’s sculptures embrace contingency with chance through the process and convention of collage. The black and white paintings present contingency of collage through a balanced, unified view of the world using Renaissance convention of fixed point perspective. His collage paintings, such as Sweet Black, provide a conceptual link between the black and white paintings and the sculptures. These works are ‘constructed’ from the processes of collage and painting, providing a physicality that tilts them towards being objects rather than images, and while essentially flat, they contain a sense of three dimensionality.
The unsentimental nature of this work is not only embodied in form it is embraced in process. McNeil’s self critical practice involves reconfiguring highly articulated images and forms in relation to a table saw. After all, the saw is “a drawing instrument; a tool for editing.”
-Marcus Bowcott