Jerry McLaughlin: Chiaroscuro by Dewitt Cheng
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
For an experimental, process-oriented painter like McLaughlin, who works without fixed conceptions of what the finished work will be, trusting in his intuition, cold wax medium, with its versatility and malleability, is the perfect medium, “exactly what I imagined painting to be.” With postwar painters like Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Pierre Soulages, and Clyfford Still on his mind—all noticeably inner-directed and individualistic—he builds large, heavily textured, translucent, and darkly monochromatic paintings.
McLaughlin’s abstract paintings lack figures, but the space that he creates within and beneath his pigmented surfaces have the metaphoric or poetic resonance of the busy chaos of the visible world. The generally monochromatic paintings, with their emphasis on shape and texture over color, are inner or dream visions with the emotional charge of Turners or Rothkos.
McLaughlin’s abstract paintings are full of paradox: psychologically imposing and charged with presence, yet empty of surrogates for the viewer (like the outward-gazing figures of Romantic painting), who is enveloped by the painting; almost overwhelmingly physical, and suggestive of ancient walls, they seem at times to evanesce and dissolve into atmosphere, only to reassemble an instant later into packed earth or stone. Born of the artist’s constructive and destructive impulses, held in dynamic balance, the works seem both unfinished and eternal, like the buildings of San Miguel de Allende, caught in perpetual becoming.
Remarks by Dewitt Cheng - CURATOR, STANFORD UNIVERSITY ART SPACES
