LARRY McGINITY
The Financial Crisis Show - Art as a Derivative.
14 paintings, 20,000 words, one conclusion...

Notes on paintings

The Financial Crisis Show – Art as a Derivative

The paintings' backgrounds, over which the texts are placed, are purposeful. For example, Wall Street has a bright and busy pattern suggesting the frenetic activity at the heart of this pivotal financial centre. In the choice of colour and composition there are echoes of Piet Mondrian's late works, produced in New York, such as Broadway Boogie Woogie. A closer look at the picture's bright blocks of primary colour reveals that the picture plane is divided in two by a white band running north to south, through the centre of the work. Across this divider a headline reads "Wall Street Aristocracy Get $1.2 Trillion from Fed". The word "Wall" falls exactly on the white band, flagging up south Manhattan's iconic thoroughfare itself.

In High Frequency Trading – the high tech method of relaying information from dealerships and networks at incredible speeds to exchanges – the pulsating strips of colour suggest the waves of information relayed along the super-fast cables from co-located hubs to the central exchanges. A cable-wide white line cuts across the centre of the picture, bisecting the grid. On the far west of this band the viewer will read the words "shortened cables" which serve to emphasise the actual physical construction – the plumbing – on which the controversial world of HFT depends.

Architecture

It is rare that a pattern, a mere suggestion of a physically existing architectural form, comes to symbolise a whole social activity. That form in The City of London is undoubtedly the building popularly known as The Gherkin, with its highly distinctive curved matrix of diagonal steel bands. In The City of London the background pattern echoes the forceful diagonals of the iconic tower, but in bright reds, yellows and blues. Here, too, there is an art-historical reference to one of the pioneering movements of modernism, De Stijl, and especially to the works of Theo van Doesburg, who, of this group of avant-garde Dutch artists, was the one who uniquely used diagonal lines.

MF Global. These texts concern the unfolding story involving the leading US derivatives brokerage and their chief backer, J P Morgan Chase & Co. The somewhat severe grey, black and white diagonal bars and occasional strips of primary colour that form the patterned background over which the Jon Corzine-led saga unfolds suggests another towering financial hub, that of JPM's New York HQ. The somewhat vertiginous pattern alludes to the great investment bank, a key player in this landmark financial scandal.

Our daily trades

Derivatives. Besides referencing architectural forms associated with finance, and specific tributes to modern masters such as Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich or Mark Rothko, I wanted to bring one other visual prompt to a number of the paintings. It was particularly important to allude to the daily process of buying and selling – the core of finance. Thus certain paintings have underlying patterns that also suggest the often highly colourful and striated blocks of colour that dealers in markets the world over view on their screens as they earn their daily bread and shape our world.

With data constantly streaming into the system from markets around the globe, software designers are acutely aware of the importance of creating colour fields that diminish the stress of constant screen watching, yet also flag up 'must catch' information in a non-dissonant digital landscape. Paintings such as Derivatives, Bailouts and Fiscal Criminality suggest just those patterns that Forex, Futures and Equities traders may well find familiar.

The Technique

Each painting, on primed board, measures 100sq cm. On this smooth surface I painted various lines, blocks of colour and grounds, shaping the design to complement the subject. The chosen texts, their typefaces and spacing were designed on a computer and transferred to an outside workshop to be turned into laser-cut stencils. Then, having applied the stencil to the painted board, I picked off each letter with a scalpel. To apply the spray paint to each individual headline or comment, all the other lines surrounding it had to be masked off. In this way I progressed down the board, selecting and blending the colours according to content and the aesthetic I required. To take a term from finance, every word is positioned so as to gain maximum leverage for my chosen subject.

The Financial Crisis Show: Art as a Derivative
Larry McGinity at Hay Hill Gallery
By Sarah Jones

Hay Hill Gallery’s 2014 exhibition schedule is set to open with Larry McGinity’s hotly anticipated project ‘The Financial Crisis Show: Art as a Derivative’. On show from the 6^th January-1^st February, the work weaves together a dramatic historical discourse with beautifully structured bands of colour. The vigour with which McGinity paints is a theatrical demonstration of complex financial networks, bright comet tails shoot across leaving trails of information.

McGinity believes that art has a responsibility to tell a story and here he uses text as though it were another colour on the palette. The recent financial crisis unfolds visually through the 14 paintings of the collection. Voiced with a myriad of intersecting quotes lifted from newspapers, each work considers one particular aspect of the whole sorry tale. The viewer is invited to literally read between the lines, seeing euphemisms out of context and undermined by contradictions. The propaganda, manipulations and generalisations are exposed as a Babel-esque coping mechanism.

Offering a very human take on the situation, the darkly humorous pieces read like tragi-comedy. Attempts to interpret the past events have led to an abstracted understanding; and the artist highlights the chaos with intricate colour rhythms. Nothing is black and white in these Chinese whispers. The text is laid under and over in grids or diagonals, a tapestry of interrupting voices borrowed from economists and financial journalists. Reds, pinks and blues are pixelated like recycled newsprint, from the brand new headlines of the morning commute to the free papers blackening the pavement after rush hour.

McGinity learned the foreign language of the business world by immersing himself within it, editing his extensive research down from half a million words to the bare bones of 20,000. These tides of information are spread out over primed boards, every letter having been painstakingly transferred by the artist in a delicate operation. Dotted and dashed like morse code, the patterns remind us of places we know, of Wall Street or the Gherkin. Busily intersecting lines are reminiscent of the London tube map, telephone wires, water pipes and electricity cables- the internal workings of a city.

With the benefit of hindsight, McGinity’s new show gives us perspective on the developing financial turmoil, gluing together the hyped up house of cards. His works are cautionary tales that reveal how we got here and why these lessons still need learning.

E-mail: info@hayhillgallery.com