‘Invest in your future, don’t dilute your finances, 401k, make sure it’s low risk, then get some real estate, 4.25 percent thirty-year mortgage.’ That bit of sound financial advice doesn’t come from Forbes or The Financial Times, but from Kendrick Lamar in the song 'YOLO'. Fiscal savviness: it’s hip, it’s now, and it’s everywhere. It’s in music. It’s even in art, because life is all about that cash money.
Young Jack McConville knows. The Scottish painter’s exhibition here shows a singular obsession with the benjamins: clouds of notes float in the sky in one piece (yeah, like ‘The Crystal Maze’); nude bathing women grasp for bills and dance around pools of coins in others. But McConville’s isn’t a straightforward obsession, he’s interested in the language and culture of online finance: liquid assets, pooled resources, fluid capital, financial reserves. Water acts as a metaphor for a capitalist drive that dominates our lives, online and in reality.
So the idea is neat, but the show actually works because McConville’s a really good painter. There are hints of the late French masters here – Cezanne, Matisse, Léger – and nods to classic art-historical tropes and imagery, all tied into a clean, simple and relatively unique aesthetic. It’s contemporary figurative painting that doesn’t suck. Which has got to be worth a few bucks.