TODD MCKIE :
DECENT PAINTINGS

NOVEMBER  9 - DECEMBER 15  

ARTFORUM DECEMBER 1999

TODD MCKIE

AT BARBARA SINGER FINE ART

In flatly rendered configurations of humanoidfs, animal creatures, plant life, and pottery positioned atop basically monochromatic grounds, the thirteen small-scale, brightly colored canvases in Todd McKie's recent show, all but one painted in synthtic vinyl, merge liberal borrowings from the history of art with apparently simple quasi-abstract biomorphic forms. The resulting works, highly self-contained paintings that suggest influences from pre-Columbian vases to Matisse, Dubuffet, and Miro, feature anthropomorphic characters who act out the myriad trials and triumphs of McKie's life.

A Cambridge-based artist, McKie is also a writer, and his titles are humorous equivalents to the quirky beings that populate his canvases. Works like So Many Colors, So Little Time, 1999 (a play on an '80s disco song), and Post-Chromatic Stress Syndrome, 1999, chronicle his experience of rushing to complete the works for the exhibition and his subsequent anxiety and sense of loss once the finished paintings were shipped off.

McKie is at his best when he is commenting on his obsessive relation to the modernist masters. In Rust Never Sleeps, 1999 (left), the largest work in the show, he offers his version of a Calder mobile. The ovoid shapes of the mobile's six abstract flat designs are repeated in the oversize brown, potato-like head and elongated torso of a central figure. The armless orange hand positioned on the figure's chest is a stunning cactuslike hybrid of a Matisse cutout. If it is true that all painters make self-portraits, then this figure is surely a stand-in for the artist, who here finds himself literally tangled up in high modernism, with Calder as its ultimate symbol. Calder's benign three-tiered mobile, its parts linked by a series of black painted chains, becomes an instrument of bondage -- even the figure's mouth is hidden by one of its horizontal bars.

In It's Not the Heat, It's the Humidity, 1999, the most hotly colored canvas in the show, a simple black loop, which begins at the base of the canvas and ends close to the middle of its right edge, is placed on an intense red-orange ground. McKie, who can't resist giving faces to abstract forms, has painted Dubuffet-like eyes, a nose, and a mouth inside the loop and added fingers to its loose end, turning it into a hand. The figure dips its head beneath a bright yellow sun. The colors, gestures, and solar imagery immediately reference and lampoon Adolph Gottlieb's bursts and Franz Kline's calligraphy.

Although some critics have described his work as "whimsical," McKie's spirited, purposely distorted childlike images are more complex than they initially appear. As McKie taps into the emotional depths of his life, he imbues simple painterly gestures with psychic resonance. His solid repertoire of puns and parodies of twentieth-century art from Matisse to Color Field is tempered by an equally strong inner voice.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     -Francine Koslow Miller

Art in America

October 2003

Todd McKie

at Victoria Munroe

A hundred years ago this year, when Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her palazzo-style home to the public as a museum, she stashed her collection of centuries-old European lace in an especially dim, frequently roped-off corner of the Veronese Room. Today, it remains there, due to her restrictive will. When it is available for viewing, one marvels at every tiny thread hand-knotted into incredibly intricate patterns, forming delicate swaths long and wide enough to wrap around cathedral altars.

In 2000, Boston painter Todd McKie spent a month as artist-in-residence at the museum and found himself enthralled by the lace and the odd, ever-so-subtle images that were worked into it. The 27 white pencil drawings in this show, mostly on black paper, were inspired by Gardner's collection, interlaced with McKie's own absurdist whimsy.

Though McKie is known for bright, flatly drawn and colored paintings that feature cartoon-simple stick figures and funny titles, these new drawings approach trompe l'oeil lace doilies, complete with drawn borders that resemble tatted edges. Inside the borders, suspended in faux textures that continue the conceit, a cavorting cast of strange and silly figures, flora, and fauna break the spell, Titles such as Its a Perennial Problem and It Seems to Happen Every Year (2002), above, Could You Still Love Me If I Became a Fiber Artist ? (2002) and Who's Your Ornithologist? (2002) suit these cartoons politely disguised as anti-macassars, which differ from the earlier paintings' direct, comic-book goofiness.

McKie's titles make one really consider the scenarios in the drawings and, by proxy, in the original lace (which might feature a clown-like face or a creature resembling an armadillo or ordinary birds and animals in inverted scale; examples were shown in an exhibition catalog). In Problem, an upended figure, half bird and half human, seems to be caught in a vortex of swirling flowers. In Fiber Artist, McKie diligently replicates a fancy geometric border, while his title indicates, perhaps, wariness at being seduced by such textile feats. In Ornithologist, a stylized dove comforts a comical Picasso-like profile sporting a large teardrop; modernism and existential modernity mix it up with antique motifs.

Though none of the narratives makes a lot of sense, the drawings are all casually delightful. McKie's sly art references, his titles that mangle trite phrases, his deft line and his romping figuration of the the comic surreal have metaphorically dusted off an ignored fragment of Gardner's vast trove.

-Ann Wilson Lloyd

 Friday, May 6, 2005       

Pathos in Flatland

By Cate McQuaid

Globe Correspondent

Todd McKie's work, with its stick-figure characters in awkward situations, is easy to chuckle along with, and that makes it easy to pigeonhole. But McKie is a painter to be reckoned with, as his new show at Gallery NAGA proves. His work has traditionally been flat; here he adds swirling dimension with lovely, mottled backgrounds. This brings his already fumbling, flat figures into more of a real world, which pushes them closer to an emotional cliff's edge.

"The Shocking Truth About Men" (left) blends deft composition with pathos, humor, and spatial depth. The ground is a shifting violet blue, lovely but also bruised. The lower cusp of a mustard sun hangs above; an argyle pattern of colored diamonds drops down from the left. The subject of the painting is a brown figure of a man - just a thick line, really - arcing hopefully upward from a single foot, only to abruptly droop. His head, upside-down, sports an apologetic pink grimace. The wonderful balance of forms - descending and ascending, concave and convex - makes a perfect vessel for this naked, squirming truth: Men both rise and droop.

McKie examines with clear-eyed affection how we strive, only to be tripped up. In "A Proud Tradition," a man lies on the ground, apparently felled by a daisy, which hovers above him like the sword of Damocles. The colors the artist stirs in his backgrounds often walk the line between florid and lurid, and that adds to the weird  blend of happiness and defeat in most of his pictures. If we chuckle, it's because we see ourselves.