Faith and Doubt in Painting; or, Confessions of a (lapsed) McKeever Believer

Ian McKeever’s show of paintings at Galeri Susanne Ottesen, ‘Portrait of a Woman’, which I managed to catch during a recent 24-hour stopover in Copenhagen, gave me a great deal to think about. None of it, sadly, to do with finding all that much to celebrate in the works themselves – more about them in a moment – but rather, with the realisation that my views on abstract painting in general, and McKeever’s paintings in particular, have undergone a radical transformation in the last couple of years; to the point where I’m left feeling a little embarrassed at having spent so much time allowing myself to be carried along by the approving critical consensus, and overlooking what I now consider to be fundamental problems with the work. I wanted to like the new paintings, I really did; however, since any honest assessment I could make of them would be little better than a hatchet job (fun to write, but, I suspect, a lot less fun to read) I have opted to go further, and use McKeever’s work as a hook on which to hang various thoughts I’ve been having, about both abstraction, and abstractcritical/Abcrit.

(more…)