Malcolm McCormick
The Guard

From December 7, 2024, to January 25, 2025

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present The Guard, Malcolm McCormick’s first solo exhibition in Toronto. Where a jigsaw blade can replace a paintbrush, McCormick continues a diverse investigation into the material realities and perceptual possibilities of historical painting practices. Beginning with a digital archive of shapes sourced from art history, the works consider colour as their driving force, and blur the line between image and object. 

Just as the paintings are composite, comprised of multiple stretched canvases structured together to create a single work, the artist also considers the exhibition itself a compounded narrative to be “read”. The works relations can be understood to be articulating open sentences and narrative–a mystery not to be solved, but felt–with shapes acting as characters and paintings as settings, open to our own interpretation and imagination.

The paintings also ask how a shape functions as sculpture, versus the image of a shape. Here a line in the work is often not an image of delineation, but where two things come together physically. This liminal area is not simply a painted line, but where canvas, paint, shadow, gallery wall and even the silver glint of hardware fill the gap where the saw has created by removal. With the object itself creating the image of nuanced line, the generosity of our perception sends mixed messages in its attempt to differentiate between surface, image and objecthood in new and surprising articulations.

Malcolm McCormick (b. Calgary, 1990) lives and works in Montreal. He holds an MFA from Concordia University, and a BFA from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Recent exhibitions include Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal (2024); Le Livart, Montreal; Joe Project, Montreal (2023); Leonard Bina and Ellen Gallery, Montreal (2018) and Kelowna Art Gallery (2017).