Robert McNally: Walled Garden

Potted plants and the shadows of trees at sunset. A small figure’s silhouette peeking from behind an open door. The imprint of a dog that died in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius at Pompeii – rigid in a dog bed. The endless curved slink of two snakes: one emerging from behind a plant, the other hanging on a hook like a wearable accessory or floatation device. Robert McNally’s paintings pull us through shifting realities and perspectives. We never quite know what we’re looking at – or where we’re standing.  The effect is disorientating and addictive: we want to see more, to know more  even as we recognise the futility of our efforts. An artwork only ever reveals what the artist intends, or what project onto it. Walled Garden, McNally’s first ever exhibition of paintings, at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Wandsworth, reflects on the role of the artist and the act of looking.

 

McNally typically prefers to work in an isolated environment, which enables him to withdraw deep into his own thoughts and to restrict outside influences. As a result, encountering his paintings feels like glimpsing a private thought process that may offer up moments of recognition while evading full comprehension. This tension – between knowing and unknowing, intimacy and distance, constraint and chaos – is captured in the idea of a walled garden, a secluded space where access is restricted. It is also embedded within his compositions: doors lead into doors, windows into windows, picture frames into picture frames. We find ourselves caught in a visual puzzle, an elaborate trick. This idea becomes literal in one painting, Ausfahrt (or ‘exit’ in German), where a glowing red orb – reminiscent of a pinball – crashes into a rigid grid of frames, sending them into wobbly disarray. What first appears ancient and solid quivers, warps, melts, becoming soft, ribbon-like, gelatinous. This work is the antithesis of its sister painting, Eingang (entry), and together they serve as metaphorical entry and departure points for the exhibition as well as for the psychological state that McNally’s work invites us to step into.

 

Elsewhere, McNally reveals the artifice of painting itself, layering his compositions with art historical references and ‘Easter eggs’ that connect one work to another. His paintings stutter and glitch – surfaces appear to crease, images fold, visual rhythms are interrupted. This interplay between analogue and digital techniques and realities is often present in McNally’s work but in this exhibition, it stems specifically from his reflections on how social media is influencing how we consume images, and the artist’s creative decision making. In the process of making these works, he consciously allowed himself to be directed by certain algorithmic trends, specifically noticing the prevalence of depictions of windows and apertures as images that ironically lend themselves well to the framing of a screen as well as variously being symbols of longing, aspiration, otherworldliness and psychological states. McNally draws on all of this through his own window depictions while playfully exposing our collective tendency not just to seek out certain types of images but to search for meaning within them – just as we attempt to decode his own work.

 

In Walled Garden, McNally invites us to step inside his world – but never fully. His paintings beckon and withhold, reveal and obscure. They remind us that seeing is an act of interpretation, shaped as much by our own desires as by the images themselves.