Tom McGlynn: This Here
by William Corwin
Tom McGlynn, Kiss and Makeup, 2021, Acrylic on birch, 48 × 96 inches. Courtesy the artist and Rick Wester Fine Art
Tom McGlynn renders imperfection perfectly, and in doing so he makes us question what order actually means.
New York, November 14, 2025
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A painting such as Kiss and Makeup (2021) presents 37 rectangles on a light ochre background. The eye scans for equivalences, symmetries, balance, but try as we might, there doesn’t appear to be a regulating geometry here. In architecture studio in college, I tried to explain to my professor Michael Graves a design decision I had made by pointing out that I had read somewhere that all the structures on the acropolis lined up with each other according to a mystical pattern: he very dryly quipped back “you can make everything line up if you try hard enough.” We often see order and patterns in things because it is comforting, and if the lines are fuzzy enough, we can make it work. McGlynn instead forces us to confront the discomfort of chaos, a very subtle and gentle chaos, by employing a crisp litigious precision wherein “almost,” as they say, “is only good in horseshoes and hand grenades.” In other words, we cannot deny that the edges in a McGlynn painting most certainly do not line up. The artist softens this disconcerting reality by making other details extremely pleasureable: the surface is an absorbent low gloss matte texture, the colors are gloriously pure and the lines marvelously clean.
Installation view: Tom McGlynn: This Here, Rick Wester Fine Art, New York, 2025. Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art.
So we become invested in the nature of adjectives in a way: what is narrow versus stocky? We can assess differing degrees of horizontality, and how that relates to painting itself: portrait versus landscape, and one’s visceral reaction to those states of imagery. In one of McGlynn’s drawings Smoke Rise, a dark orange pastel horizontal is surmounted by a thicker but still horizontal brown bar, and that is itself surmounted by an even larger, horizontal blue bar, all widely spaced on a greenish off-white sheet. While horizontality and verticality are always orthogonal, the three forms are off-kilter, making the composition unstable and moveable. The blue is sky-like, but its strict parameters make us question that assumption: the artist is messing with us, color theory is really about comfort and association, but a neat paradox like Smoke Rise forces us to reconsider. In Our Haus (2024), we are captivated by the complementarity between the bluish-evergreen of the background and the blue deep pink and lemon yellow rectangles at the top. The other four rectangles seem to be approximating that level of color camaraderie to less success: the bottom left rectangle is a bit too red, the middle tight one is too blue, and yet these are simply color swatches next to each other, yet at least to me they seem deeply psychological.
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There generally seems to be an argument with Mondrian going on here: while mature Piet tirelessly adjusted his lines and squares, advocating for a divine harmony, and limiting his colors to the primary ones, McGlynn is searching for a mellow compromise in almost every possible arrangement and combination—anything is possible, and you sense a constant subtitle to all the works along the lines of “well how about this?” A kind of Modernist Rorschach: a reshuffling of the possibilities, with a slightly darker background, brighter more dissonant colors. The centerpiece of the exhibition—with a wall to itself—is Force Major (2025). It is the biggest painting, but it comprises two panels. McGlenn ponders the idea of centering by creating an impossible situation within his set of rules. There are seven forms, spread across two panels. He could simply reject the idea of balance, but instead he approximates it, which is more tricky. There are three rectangles to the left and three to the right, and a blue one, kind of in between. But to be perfectly centered, the blue rectangle would have to straddle both panels. This seems off-limits: instead the robin’s egg rectangle rests directly on the edge, re-orienting the center of the painting off center, and simultaneously calling attention to the fact that the painting is two equal panels. Seven rectangles has become a philosophical treatise on perception and our obsession with bilateral symmetry. Or perhaps it’s entirely in my head.