Cian McLoughlin: Three Principles
by Tom Lordan
The relationship between perception and the perceptible lies at the core of Cian McLoughlin’s newest works, and this relationship is posed in several senses. More specifically, to render the relationship tangible, McLoughlin’s paintings negotiate three principles - two formal and one conceptual - that figure prominently within the discourse of contemporary visual art.
Before discussing these new works, however, it is useful to situate them within the trajectory of the artist’s practice over the last 25 years. Befitting his reputation as an educator and mentor for aspiring painters, McLoughlin is an eloquent communicator of the concerns that have motivated his exploration of the medium, and, consequently, we have at our disposal a useful record comprised of McLoughlin’s own reflections. Taking various talks, statements and biographical notes into consideration, as well as using the evidence of our own eyes, it’s clear that McLoughlin’s body of work splits into three main stages.
The first phase, which was the longest-lasting of the three, is characterised by an obsession with interiority. More specifically, these works interrogated the ways that subjective interiority is experienced by and recognised in the Other. During this early stage, McLoughlin repeatedly, insistently painted portraits of varying degrees of abstraction, seeking to both capture and reveal the mystery of another person’s inner world - their emotional complexity, their spiritual ache, the shifting pattern of their thoughts. After mining this seam extensively, McLoughlin expanded his line of investigation outward, into social modes of reason and affect. Having pursued the individual to its exhaustion, McLoughlin’s work transitioned into a study of crowds. This second phase involved a greater emphasis on structured forms, shapes and patterns that denoted attitudes, changing and crystallising mandala-like in the heady cauldron of a collective experience. The artist was still preoccupied by the singular and obscure depths of personhood, but not located in a single sentience: these paintings depicted interhuman states, both active and passive, passing like clouds through the mountain-range of humanity. Accompanying this movement from the individual to the collective, McLoughlin read widely on crowd psychology and the science of consciousness.
Precipitating the next development in his practice, McLoughlin joined NCAD as a student, looking to return to first principles: the artist sought to assess and reinvigorate the most basic assumptions of his painting in a new, unfettered light, leading to a radical re-evaluation of the function of colour. This third phase is the one that confronts us today. McLoughlin’s most recent efforts are, in short, drastic experiments in the interplay between visual cognition and stimuli. Bringing this biographical section to an end, we should also note that the particular character of McLoughlin’s back-to-basics approach has been influenced by his year-long artist residency at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, which has expanded his knowledge of an existing area of interest: cutting-edge scientific research into consciousness, intelligence, and perception.
How does this new stage relate to the previous, you might ask? The answer is simple: these new works do not go beyond the individual, they go below. They do not seek to interpret or contextualise subjectivity; they now address the perceptual mechanics that condition the emergence of subjectivity itself. McLoughlin’s work is no longer personal, or even inter-personal, rather it is sub- and im-personal.
This is the trajectory that we must bear in mind when we seek to understand the aesthetic of McLoughlin’s new work, which will furthermore be facilitated by an all-too-brief analysis of the three principles I mentioned at the outset.
The first principle has already been touched on: colour. McLoughlin’s bold, sharp experiments are fundamentally attuned to the properties of colour. One framework for understanding the nature of chromatic phenomena divides colour into three contiguous features: hue, value, and saturation. The hue of a colour is what one typically refers to when identifying or categorising the colour, namely red, violet, yellow etc. The value of a colour refers to its position on a continuum of light and dark - sky blue, for instance, is lighter than navy blue. The saturation of a colour refers to its purity or intensity: a desaturated colour doesn’t simply look ‘light’, it appears pale, or washed-out, whereas a saturated colour looks as though there’s a high-voltage electric bulb glowing beneath its surface. McLoughlin’s efforts aim to dismantle and disorient these features. This strategy of chromatic derangement consists of two prongs: McLoughlin combines two saturated, high-intensity colours, which are proximate on the light-to-dark value scale.
Imagine a group of paint patches on an easel. There are a number of hues, and each hue is variously light and dark. Now imagine taking a black-and-white photograph of this easel: there would appear patches that seem identical to one another, despite the fact that their hues and saturation-levels were entirely different. McLoughlin makes use of this value-pair to combine two colours that are otherwise disjunctive, in order to produce an uncomfortable optical effect. McLoughlin’s colour combinations clash vividly - they work with and against one another. Their entanglement comprises a problem in and for perception.
The second principle is also formal, namely perspective. McLoughlin’s technique, which is the result of an extensive process of trial-and-error, involves a base-layer of one colour, over which a thin plastic stencil is placed and the second colour is applied. Digital designs have been mapped into the stencils by a manufacturing laser. This process renders a swathe of intriguing results, contingent and extemporaneous, but the most significant is that as the stencil is removed and the material pulls away from the canvas, it leaves a residue behind that lifts upwards, creating microscopic pillars of paint. As much as the paintings may seem flat, consequently, this flatness is an illusion. What is revealed when you approach the works up close, or approach them from an oblique angle, is the painting’s ‘depth’. This depth is experienced as a shifting or transitioning from one visual arrangement to another; what seemed to be a static green background with pink punctuation, for instance, now appears to be a sea of flushed rose. Colours flood and retreat across the surface of McLoughlin’s paintings, like blushing skin.
The third principle is conceptual, and is nothing less than a meditation on the human and the artificial. Due to its clean lines, grid patterns, and vibrant colours, McLoughlin’s new aesthetic invites and dispels comparisons with both analogue-machine outputs and digitally-rendered imagery. First, there is the technique and its execution: what began as an attempt to make paintings without a human hand, to rely only on software, lasers, stencils and mechanical colour applicators, ended in frustration. Imperfections crept into the finished product, illicit asymmetries that were the consequences of McLoughlin’s own activity, born from lifting the stencil, “over-applying” the paint, etc. The artist quickly realised that these moments of disorder, unplanned and unplannable, were what gave the work its life. Second, there is the organic phenomenological response: the clash that gives rise to an almost visual nausea is, de facto, felt as much as seen. This same perceptual logic is programmed into the shifting faces of the painting’s surface. Hence, the experiential quality of the work, due to its chromatic and perspectival features, makes a claim on human physiology, on our embodied awareness. These paintings do not photograph easily: they cannot be read or scanned, but are rather interventions into the somatic site of consciousness. This thought is referenced in McLoughlin’s motif of the rubber duck, dotted throughout his work, which alludes to a difficulty that even sophisticated AI models have for sorting types into the correct category.
Albeit short, I hope this precis gives the reader an indication of the richness at work in McLoughlin’s current paintings. Looking at his new work, I am reminded of the value placed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the “Untimely figure,” a person who happily and persistently fails to know what everyone else does. In his unthwarted valorisation of the medium of paint, in his focus on the phenomenological impact of colour, and in his belief in the power of visual art to elucidate essential human characteristics, McLoughlin is out on his own in 2024, cutting a solitary path. This new terrain is a wilderness - who knows what he will stumble upon next?
Tom Lordan is an art critic and graduate of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston UK