Jack McConville: Tutti Fertiti

About

Jack McConville creates strong and vibrant series of paintings inspired by events mined from internet sources, which range from academic scientific journal articles to the 'lowbrow' culture of celebrity scandal. McConville's paintings infuse the content of digital culture with a strong awareness of art history to create works of a hybridised 'classical digital' nature. His works are often concerned with the blurring of the private and public personae of individuals as a result of the growing encroachment of the digital sphere. In his series You'll Never Spa in This Town Again (2012), initiated from an online source detailing the expose of a Hollywood spa frequented by closeted superstars, McConville created a series of works which invoked the painterly tradition of the public bath, spanning from Ingres' Turkish baths to Matisse's interiors and Hockney's pools. Shifting between figurative and abstract positions, McConville's paintings create graphic signs stripped of expressive or descriptive intentions. This painterly approach emphasises the unique object status of the paintings and their placement within a culture of mass reproduction and proliferation of information. For Tramway, McConville has created a series of paintings that examine the manipulative power of images and the ways in which they often come to define the power relations at work within a wider social context. Taking its influence from the obscure writings of the 16th century alchemist philosopher Giordano Bruno and tracing their subsequent influence and relevance to the iconography of mass culture, McConville's new work forms the basis of a re-examination of the values and historical myths which permeating the present day societal constructs which inform our perception.