Further Unmanned Strategies Painting

Christian McLeod is a painter who is completely secure in his own skin, not duped by art-world fetishizing of the new and confusing of the new with the important. Craig Scott, Canadian Member of Parliament. Christian McLeod updates the codes of contemporary abstraction in referencing the visual realities of a mediatized society. Rather than following the codes and canons of abstraction, McLeod brings a new energy to abstraction, drawing on and mixing a range of sources like the internet, raw environmental and experiential phenomena, digital screen imaging and video for his art. John K. Grande Painting is my way of remembering and interpreting beauty and destruction. I begin by viewing reality as composed of layers of colour and shape, observing the way light reflects off an object, and the tension objects generate when placed next to or on top of each other. Landscapes from a great distance become a single object. I try to capture the shift between perceiving the landscape as an organic whole, and seeing the particles that comprise it - buildings, rivers, vehicles, birds, harbours, roadways, minerals, machinery, aircraft, farms, data cables, people in movement. Heaps of paint are placed, plotted and pushed. For some works this process can take years. For others, the image forms within days. I love the tactile movement of paint across the canvas, but fully half my time in the studio is spent looking, searching the surface of the painting for points of entry. Paintings are worked and reworked, images accumulate. I tend to work on several pieces simultaneously, exploring different themes in each one. This exhibition, "˜Passing Over,' contains works created within the last several years. The title refers to my interest in the shift between macro and micro views - a century and a half ago, photography liberated painting from the task of representation; today, satellite imagery redefines how we perceive our landscape and environment, and thus blurs the line between abstraction and representation. I operate in that gap between abstraction and representation, between the bird's-eye view and the microscope. Christian McLeod, March 31, 2010