Current Reflections - Kathryn MacNaughton

Simard Bilodeau is thrilled to present Current Reflections, Canadian artist Kathryn MacNaughton’s first solo exhibition with the gallery on view from 21 September to 26 October 2024. In this, her most recent body of work, MacNaughton yields to a wholly intuitive painting practice, establishing herself as a proponent of curiosity and poet of form.  

During the year in which she worked on the paintings for this show, MacNaughton encountered failure with the same enthusiasm as success, citing them as equitably necessary to her personal and artistic growth. To the perceived zealous abandon of abstract impressionism, she brings discipline and patience, each fluid composition a performance of impulse and index of embodiment.

The sweeping scale of such paintings as ‘Shifting Position’ and ‘Offshore Breeze’ demand a physical intensity conducive to the painterly freedom MacNaughton seeks. Her approach to materiality is both intentional and free form, defined by an attentive spontaneity that unfolds in every gesture. With the canvas stretched flat on the floor, MacNaughton is free to pour paint directly onto its surface, allowing it to flow organically, or manipulating it’s course at whim. In every movement, she must decide whether to take control, or relinquish it, when to guide the paint and when to let it just be. In this sense, the artist captures the very essence of life itself; a dynamic expression of the chaotic and calm thoughts that power our bodies through this world.

Colour—here a dynamic force in constant interaction—takes centre stage in Current Reflections. Through experimentation, MacNaughton reveals unexpected combinations that merge into striking gradients. In ‘Tropical Storm’, for example, the spirited collision of colour, movement, and form becomes a tangible reflection of the energy the artist brings to the canvas. Pools of swampy green are fissured by hot pinks and sunset oranges that pulsate and haemorrhage, emitting the light of an action now past whilst defining the emotion that prompted it.

Moving away from the pastels that accented some of her earlier collections, the palette of MacNaughton’s Current Reflections draws inspiration from her present everyday life: fleeting moments like gazing at the ever-changing sky or the vibrant facades of Lisbon’s streets, where she currently resides. As the colours blend and seep into one another, they form new relationships, evolving in tandem with the artist’s own shifting perceptions and surroundings. The resulting visual experience activates a map for the eye, leading it through waves of hue and texture that mirror the emotional and sensory exchanges between the artist and her environment.

MacNaughton builds up the surface of her pieces with multiple veils of paint, layering them to create deep, sculptural textures. These surfaces embody harmonious contradictions: at once contemporary and timeless, flat yet sculptural, meticulously compiled yet effortlessly playful, still but unmistakably alive. In a way, they feel almost spiritual, conceived by an ability to think and see without a predetermined image. Here the viewer is held at the surface and tempted within, rhythmically passing through the artist’s subtle, poetic passages and grasping too at the unlimited possibilities life presents.

Kathryn MacNaughton was born and raised in Toronto, Canada and resides in Lisbon, Portugal. She graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design in 2007 and has since exhibited internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Impulsive Impressions at Bau Xi Gallery, Toronto (2024); Moving Parts presented by BEERS London at Saatchi Gallery (2023) and Passages at MAGMA Gallery, Bologna (2023).