I know when I write on this site I generally write about paintings and how paintings make you feel about the world, but when I write about Geoff McFetridge I generally feel like I am finding ways to write about ideas. I’m writing about writing almost, as the Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist has arrived at his craft through an almost author’s mind. In a sense, these works ask “How do we visualize memory?” “How do we understand time?” And then, those questions are asked as ideas, and then painted from there. It’s a symphonic process.
For Grasslands, on view at Cooper Cole in Toronto, McFetridge has gone back to the land, as he has in a few shows and bodies of work, though this feels less implicit and more serene than in the past. It could be perhaps the looser, more refined oil painting process, but it again, there is something that McFetridge taps into when he goes purely anonymous with his characters. Time stops. The landscapes feel familiar but not so certain. You can’t quite grasp if these are cinematic stills or just painted purely from imagination.
One work in particular, Sleepers, a clockwork circle of cars all bumper-to-bumper, is one of my favorite motifs of McFetridge. Where are we going? Why we do keep travel over the same old ground, and why is everyone doing the same thing? It is a painting that evokes the perfect balance of collective consciousness and the never-ending cycle of memory and shared lived experience. We are on this road together, all following each other in harmony and, sometimes, stuck in place yet somehow always moving. —Evan Pricco
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