Accompanying Text written by Francis Halsall
The slowness and precision Paul McKinley evokes in his exquisite paintings belies the anger at the injustice that motivated their production. For the last 15 years he has depicted landscapes in his meticulous, figurative style that are suffused with trauma and human suffering. For ‘Ag Tochailt’ (digging) he moves his focus away from previous places including Afghanistan, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Greece to The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The title is an allusion to the Casement Report (1904) written by Irish nationalist and activist Roger Casement to describe abuses in the Congo Free State, then privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium.
The paintings have their origins in documentary photographs taken for commercial use which deploy a utilitarian rather than aestheticizing gaze. But McKinley doesn’t merely copy the images. Instead he mediates them through his own, recognisable, painterly technique. It is quickly obvious that whilst the scenes contain evidence of human activity and intervention there are no figures visible which might tie things down to specific times and places. This effect of poignant absence uncouples the landscapes from specific places and the experiences of particular people living there hinting at something more universal. It also allows the viewer to focus on the skill McKinley has employed and the formal decisions that have been made in building the images from a basis of drawn and traced lines toward a complex interplay of form and colour.
In their formal rigour, these paintings stand alone. Yet McKinley remains committed to their grounding in narrative. The starting point here is The Motorcycle Diaries a book about Che Guevara’s travels through South America in 1952 when his political awakening into the revolutionary he would become came from witnessing exploitation in the mining industry. This inspired McKinley to revisit his own previous work on genocidal injustices in Rwanda and turn his attention to DRC. And whilst the work comes from such a dark place and confronts some ugly, unpalatable truths it does so with an optimism that matches the quiet beauty of the paintings.
