Lonely Tourist:Jock McFadyen @ the Royal Academy.

"Holding you, couldn't be alone" - Archangel, Burial

From the Greenway 3 (2003)

They should have had Burial's Untrue album playing on a loop at the Royal Academy's free show of Jock McFadyen's work, Tourist without a Guidebook. The moody ambient dubstep of Burial's early music would have sat perfectly with McFadyen's paintings of skyscrapers viewed from wastelands, graffitied walls, abandoned buildings, and garage forecourts at night.

Hell, McFadyen has even, like Burial, named one of his pieces Nightbus - although, to be fair, that work is one of the biggest outliers in the show. More of that later. McFadyen was born in Paisley in 1950 (you'd never guess he was Scottish with that name) but has made London, specifically East London, his subject for the last four and half decades of his life.

McFadeyn's London, as the title of the exhibition proudly proclaims, is not the London of the guidebooks but the London of scruffy streets, litter, peeling posters, and down at heel storefronts. It could be read as a testament, a political statement even, about urban decay but McFadyen rejects these claims, asserting that he has no agenda and that his work is, in fact, like all painting, abstract.

Elephant (1996)

K.M.B. (2007-08)

The subject of his paintings, McFadyen asserts, is the paint itself and, for that reason, except for one board on entry to the show, there is no explanatory text. McFadyen wants us to approach his art unencumbered by explanation and didacticism. To feel it and to experience it rather than be taught about it.

Sounds good to me. That's how we take the sights of the city in as we walk around it. Either aimlessly or with purpose. The peeling adverts on the walls of tube stations, a nod to the psychogeographical decollages of Mimmo Rotella, and the seemingly random graffiti (Charlie Chaplin, tags, stickmen, IDST?) that covers the surface of so many buildings will be very familiar to those with even a cursory knowledge of London away from Big Ben and the London Eye.

Tate Moss (2010)

The Shore Ditch (2019)

Blackmans Yard (2003)

Because of this, McFadyen's work is strangely evocative and, to me, rarely more so than when, in works like The Shore Ditch, Blackmans Yard, and Goodfellas, he captures a piece of vernacular, careworn architecture and imbues it with a feeling of being somehow alive.

The buildings, often set beneath large expansive blue (or grey) skies, seem to be full of the ghosts of their past. Often they're no longer functioning and have instead become host to weeds and small trees, nature finding its way in the urban environment as it so often does. Nature that, in some way, reflects us learning to live in a city that can at times seem designed to make money at the expense of all else. Glass and steel skyscrapers may dwarf us and make us feel small but without us they are nothing.

Goodfellas (2001)

Nightbus (2020)

In recent years, it seems, McFadyen has extended his repertoire into sometimes crude, outlandish and oversized, portraiture. Night buses can be the scenes of some pretty horrific happenings (and some outrageously fun ones too) but I don't think I've ever witnessed anything quite like McFadyen's Nightbus in which a grotesquely made up figure faces another unusual looking specimen in some undignified stand off.

Nightsters 2 and Harvey 2 seem to look at the world of late night London with its bars, nightclubs, and strip clubs, and shows them to be seedy, lonely places peopled with the marginal of society. Freakish faces either stare out at us or ogle waitresses as if Edward Hopper has become possessed by the malevolent spirit of James Ensor.

Nightsters 2 (2019)

Harvey 2 (2018)

Roman Road 2021 (2021)

It's almost a relief to be back outside in the cold and the dark of Roman Road during what may well have been a recent lockdown. Empty streets are illuminated by headlights, stars, and late night shops in a scene that looks both inviting and potentially dangerous.

McFadyen's Cambridge Heath petrol station owes a debt to Ed Ruscha yet while Ruscha's gas stations are deeply embedded within the world of Pop Art. McFadyen's are more earthy, more British, more London. You can almost imagine filling up here, making an impulse purchase of a Crunchie while paying for your unleaded at the till.

Cambridge Heath (2004)

Bank (1997)

I guess that's what make McFadyen's work so affecting. The sense of art being made of things we too often take for granted. The idea that somebody is looking out at the city and trying to make sense of it in the same way we do every time we travel around it. McFadyen's art is an art that takes the prosaic, the quotidian, and the everyday and renders it, if not quite abstract as he says, but extraordinary. He sees the beauty in that which others may dismiss and he presents it to us warts and all and lets us make our own minds up. I'm not sure exactly what he thinks of these views but I think he finds them rather inspiring. In that, I'm in complete accordance with him. It inspires me to continue exploring the mysterious and elusive city that London really is.

Pink Flats (2006)