Jock McFadyen: Made in Hackney 2, The Grey Gallery, exhibition review: ‘The outside world as a sensory force’
Bethnal Green and Mont Blanc. Photograph: Jock McFadyen
A sliver of Bethnal Green sits low on the horizon, blocky grey urban mish-mash spotted with tiny lights.
In a delightful twist, Mont Blanc rises up behind the cityscape, dominated by a massive glowering sky above.
Bethnal Green and Mont Blanc is one of 13 landscapes exhibited at Made in Hackney 2, Jock McFadyen’s new show at the Grey Gallery in London Fields.
Painting in the studio perhaps encourages spatial overlay of this sort; images in memory are not stored in isolated corners, after all, but collide and merge.
Fife. Photograph: Jock McFadyen
The work collected in this show has all been crafted indoors, figuring the outside world as a sensory force.
The sites depicted in the canvasses range from the artist’s native Scotland to the English coast and urban East London, all cast as vast empty spaces of rich colour.
McFadyen’s characteristic combination of limpid tones interspersed with patches of complex texture subordinates the built environment to great sweeps of nature.
These are paintings in which you will be lost.
Jock McFadyen: Made in Hackney 2 runs until 16 June at The Grey Gallery, 4 Helmsley Place, London Fields, E8 3SB.