Tom McGlynn

Tom McGlynn, Decal (Pink Grounded), 2019, acrylic on birch panel; 36 x 36 in.

Tom McGlynn suspends a black rectangle and a raspberry rectangle above a pink background, and calls it: Decal (Pink Grounded).

“Decal:” portable, ubiquitous, and scalable commercial signage that flourishes only briefly in its usefulness and messaging power. “Pink grounded:” physically fixed in pink paint on canvas. In this simple act, McGlynn achieves a poetry of opposites.

Like a perfumer, relying on intuition, McGlynn uses both physical and computer-generated color to pretest a broad range of possibilities. Working in a reduced abstract format lets McGlynn suspend judgment at beginnings and ends and jump into the middle of the creative process, into paradox, into a full emptiness from which he returns with objects that both carry and emit color, and calculate the ungraspable.

Part of Passing Bittersweet, a 2020 exhibition at the Williams Center Gallery. Find more of Tom McGlynn’s work on his website.