Niall McClelland
Cypher

From January 9 to February 22, 2025

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Cypher, a solo exhibition by Niall McClelland, in collaboration with Clint Roenisch Gallery.

“This wasn’t intentional. I’ve spent my whole life in cities, and naturally, my work was shaped by that perspective. Distinctly urban elements were consistently reflected, borrowed, layered and referenced, successfully. “The City” was a constant presence, an important character in the tone of my work for many years. I’ve bounced around a lot for a few years, I didn’t have my own studio—just one thing after another. It’s the same old story, but you adapt, right? Keep things nimble.

Then, in the Fall of 2022, things shifted. I began working from a cabin a few hours northeast of Toronto. It’s tucked away by the water, facing west over Lake Huron. The sky feels enormous up there, and the weather changes rapidly, sometimes by the hour—wildly, unpredictably. There are moments of light so breathtaking, so sublime, they literally stop me in my tracks. But it can also get violent. The storms are fierce, the darkness absolute, and the silence is deafening. I’m alone there a lot. It’s scary, but cinematic as hell, and I’m into it. That environment—isolated, raw, elemental—began to reshape my sensibilities. My circumstances changed, and with it, my work evolved.

I’ve set up a studio in a small garage just fifty feet from the cabin. It’s basic, raw, and a little chaotic, but it’s perfect. The bugs are relentless—so many spiders—and in the summer it’s sweltering, while fall brings a biting cold. The lighting’s awful, but it has what I need. Everything about that space, its roughness, its messiness, its anxious, melancholic energy, is woven into the work. It grew to reflect the physicality of the place—the tension between beauty and discomfort, the quiet weight of being alone in this new, unpredictable environment.

There are no ideas in advance of these new paintings, no set procedure except to proceed. The uniform size is a jumping off point for unknown destinations, a challenge, opening up the space for the kind of abandon in playing without knowing how to play, and there is a freedom to that improvisation. Each painting is a roll of the dice, a gamble, no maps, each move plays off the last, mashing contrasting sources, relying on an intuitive process. The rawness of the process shows in the work—through erasures, defacements and the marks that remain. The paintings teeter between something muscular and discordant, and something more elegant, even seductive. Painted in a cabin several hours from the city, they carry the traces of their making, reflecting the rough, unpredictable energy of the rural studio itself.”

Niall McClelland (b.1980) is an Irish, Toronto-based artist. He graduated from Emily Carr University (2004). His work has been represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery (Toronto) since 2011, including five solo exhibitions. He’s shown widely in the U.S and overseas, with solo exhibitions in New York City (Envoy Enterprises) and San Francisco (Eleanor Harwood Gallery), as well as inclusion in group exhibitions at P.P.O.W.(NYC), Wrong Answer(NYC), Jerome Pauchant(Paris), Wil Aballe (Vancouver), Ingram’s (LA), Gallerie Nosco (Brussels), Mercer Union (Toronto), The PowerPlant (Toronto), MoCA (Toronto), The Art Museum (Toronto), Plug-In ICA (Winnipeg), amongst others. Since 2015, he’s been commissioned to produce a number of large-scale exterior public artworks locally and internationally for clients including Toyota, Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, Maple Leaf Sports + Entertainment, Concord, The Humber River Hospital, CAMH, and Etobicoke General Hospital. Recent publication features include Border Crossings, Modern Painters, Dazed Digital, ARTnews, Canadian Art, The Toronto Star, The White Review, Esse, and SFAQ.