Robert McNally: Tired Horses

Interested in the tension between knowing and unknowing, intimacy and distance, constraint and chaos, McNally’s work typically evolves from periods of isolation which allow him to withdraw deep into his own thoughts and archive of collected images. For this exhibition, he returns to a period of artistic struggle, when he was living in Berlin and making time-intensive pencil drawings as well as experimenting with toothpaste as material, which he tried and failed to preserve except through photographs. Those images are reimagined here in acrylic paint – impermanence rendered permanent – where the toothpaste takes on an even more glossy appearance, tracing the outline of a face drawn from antiquity or a caricature, or becoming sculptural in its own right, forming the stem of a drooping flower in a pair of paintings reflecting daytime and nighttime, not just temporally but as psychological states. McNally is heavily reliant on what he calls the ‘subconscious drive’ and the mismatched shadow in the nighttime painting reflects this sense of something other revealing itself.

Alongside the toothpaste works are compositions more typical of McNally’s practice, layered with multiple perspectives, materialities, art historical references and ‘Easter eggs’  that connect one work to another. Touch and the act of making remain central, articulated through sculptural objects, a biro pen and a ripped image of an artist at work. In the artist’s hands, again subtly mismatched, one arm seemingly emerging from beyond the border, are a brush and scalpel, a palette smeared with paint and a blob of toothpaste. His intense focus is heightened by the cut out line around his face, dripping with blood. Here, the artist appears both immersed in and estranged from the act of making itself, caught between control and disintegration.