The Brooklyn Rail

A single line drawn across a plane may be the most forthright representation of time, presenting it as a continuous and irreversible sequence of events. But the perception of time is often different in actual experience. For artist Richard McDonough, it is evidenced in layers and the patient building up of surfaces. In a series of eleven new works that make up Richard McDonough: House Full of Time at Europa gallery, the artist creates thick constructions of wood and foam over which canvas is stretched. The canvas is painted in vibrant colors, taped up into a grid, then painted again in colors that bleed and pool into each other. Over this, the artist painstakingly applies in bricklike patterns small tiles of dried acrylic paint swirled and speckled in contrasting tones. The results resemble architectural facades that have fallen into decay with recessed pockets of space carved into them that suggest windows, doorways, keyholes. McDonough’s bold colors, tempered with mottlings of gray and black, evoke overgrown vegetation or emissions of light leaking through creviced walls. The work troubles our sense of the interior and the exterior as the significance of foreground and background shifts back and forth.

In House Full of Time (green) (2023), sixteen depressions carefully shaped into arched doorways rise in four-across rows. At seven feet high and six feet across, the object feels solid, imposing, and yet it seems to recede before the eye as scatterings of black and leafy green tiles overwhelm a backdrop of terracotta and hot pink paint. If the object’s contours imply an abandoned building—maybe a multi-story warehouse—its colors hint at a vine-covered future in which the structure collapses back into the landscape it once overtook. The edges of one doorway in the center of the composition glow with magenta paint. The oranges and reds of a spectacular setting or rising sun spill out from another. A close look reveals a series of four hidden doorways, identical in size and shape to the cutout forms above but indicated only in paint, hiding along the bottom of the object. Discerning them only after a few minutes of looking, I feel as if I have been rewarded with a wonderful secret.

Gates Ave (2023) presents a black painted canvas over which mostly-black tiles have been fixed. Two long windows, arched at their tops, fill the center of the work. Within them, larger tiles of aqua and rose lie neatly over matching sections of canvas, but here the paint used to make them has been swirled and pressed, and the resulting strips of acrylic resemble the small glass slides used for microscope samples. The aqua sections have an underwater, microbial feel while the rose panels hold paint splotches that bring to mind cells, nerve endings, or pressed flowers. Step back from the work and it becomes a windowed wall again, but the situation of the viewer and what they are looking at becomes muddled; whether we are inside looking out or outside looking in is uncertain.

Seneca Ave (2023) is a large horizontal composition of bright yellows and pinks overlaid with tiles of shadowy gray. A pair of circular cutouts with four long vertical channels beneath them have been incised right in the center of the work. Within them, veins of black paint run along the criss-crossings of a painted grid, while horizontal lines drawn in pencil, meant as guides for where to place the tiles, recall the thoughtfulness of Agnes Martin. There is a calmness to be found in the symmetry of the two circles and the solidity of the object that tempers the ebullience of the underlying colors, although not entirely. Throughout the painting, small areas of canvas remain uncovered by tiles, creating the effect of the brickwork of a wall falling away as some great source of light beyond it bursts through. The shapes cut into the work suggest stained glass windows standing in the ruins of an old church wall. As a young artist, McDonough spent time in the Burren, a region in the west of Ireland known for its moonlike ridges of bare limestone which, in the spring, are striped magenta and gold by the blooming of wild thyme and gorse and these colors, whether consciously chosen or merely embedded in a latent memory, find their way into the work.

In Locke Rd (2023), a smaller painting measuring a foot and a half high and almost as wide, McDonough covers his surface entirely with a camouflage of green and black strips which continue inside a singular depression, about the size of a fist and shaped like a keyhole, that is carved into the center of the work. Discovering this figure-in-the-carpet is one of many rewards the artist provides to the unhurried and the patient; the complexity of his process yields constructions as full of clues as they are mysteries. For the viewer, time pauses, spins around and starts again in the act of differentiating and the details yet to be found.