John McAllister L'Almanach 14

John McAllister lives in Los Angeles. He is only 40 years old, and has exhibited at the James Fuentes Gallery in New York since 2008. He seems to be far removed from the chatty concerns of art made to comfort viewers. His paintings are entirely focused on the impossible mission to pursue with the experiments by 20th century great masters, who made the captation of light within the restrictive space of the canvas a non-negotiable obsession. [...]  Matisse's painting is now the utmost model for McAllister. It haunts each and every one of the paintings he has presented at James Fuentes Gallery in 2011. [ ... ] John McAllister studied photojournalism at the University of Texas in Austin. He knows intuitively that it’s a little vain to force paintings to tell news reports, without needing to revive the controversy of the predominance of form over content. [...] It is not certain that the artist's painting tell nothing about the contemporary world. Rather it says things differently, with feelings rather than evidence, with intuitions rather than reasonings.

–Eric Troncy