FUTURE PERFECT 2021

FUTURE PERFECT

McLeod’s beautiful, tangible response to the pandemic and our relationship to this incubating period is rife with colour and emotion. In this series, McLeod expresses ideas relating to quarantine, lockdown, and our collective hopes and dreams for what could happen once life resumes. The thick, lush palette of his oil paintings exemplify a positive, hopeful view of this “future perfect” when we are free to execute plans hatched over the past couple of years.

“I take a micro and macro look at homes, communities, structures and landscapes, as well as the rooms and objects and emotions that reside within,” says the Toronto-based artist. The future is addressed in its actual sense, but also in our emotional, visceral and intellectual response to what lies ahead. “Our habitats, and the landscape they occupy include the horizon line, for me this is a look to the future, what is just beyond that,” says McLeod.

A sense of anticipation is felt in the joyous application of bold and confident brush strokes in McLeod’s large-scale works. Each piece reflects light from almost all angles, due in part to the artist’s impasto technique, giving them a lustre and richness to the eye.

Stylistically, the works are also layered with McLeod’s interpretation of data flow and lines of code and how they can mirror our physical world. These correlations are even more relevant in recent days as we all spend more time online, personally, socially and professionally. “I found that as I explored the imagined shapes of data packets, lines of code formed into homes, buildings, horizon lines and eventually they became whole in the image,” says McLeod. Under the artist’s keen interpretation, the future, perfect or otherwise, is layered with architectures of both nature and man. These utopian worlds include a balance of city and country, reflecting the life McLeod has lived both in Europe, Canada and Mexico.