The title of Keegan Monaghan’s fourth solo show at James Fuentes, IN, is both literal and allusive. On the former front, it describes how these nine works in oil on canvas—each a cropped view of a notched or gridded space, impossible to name (a shelf? a drain? a cornice?) though somehow decisively built in every case—beckon their viewer into vague, hidden interiors. This is complicated by the fact that, despite their humanish scale (seven of the nine are near-square rectangles with sides between four and six feet), their content gives off an optical sense of marked enlargement: Entering them would entail crawling into, say, the gap between paving stones. “In,” of course, implies the “out” where a viewer has to remain.
Such a perceptual limbo opens onto the allusive dimension, which circles the problem of taste. On one hand, Monaghan’s postimpressionist urbanism, his attempt to put the visible sensations of wandering a city down on canvas, is no doubt retrograde, “not in.” The palettes are often pure Pissarro in their beiges, browns, pinks, and blues. A couple tend closer to Bonnard’s warm oranges, while the only failure is a too–van Gogh arrangement of dappled yellows. Together, an atmosphere emerges of city life before its descent into the present monotony of glass façades and brushed steel. But then, by restricting his means to a few decades of painting in the orbit of Durand-Ruel (the advent of the modern art market) and pushing those means toward the parodic—le point blown up to large filbert daubs, the impasto thick as icing, the line even more cartoonish—he gets at a kind of good-natured knowingness about the possibility, and the demand, of doing something new with the medium.
This parody finally returns to the state of painting today, where the free play of abstract and figurative elements is a dominant trend (“in”), one that’s already exhausted what little novelty it ever had. Monaghan’s subtle handling of value and hue allows these compositions to dissolve back and forth between stony, built sensations of early modernity’s urban landscapes and softer color fields of nonobjective geometry. The show’s strongest pictures, such as the furnace-like IN 8 (2024), manage a total reconciliation of their abstract and figurative dimensions: As soon as I see the glow of fire within this patchwork of deep blue-green browns, the absolute unity of the surface drags my vision back to the dumb fact of paint on canvas; the “fire within” flattens to an orange diamond set within a dark expanse. While this effect is all but lost in documentation, in person, the cycle continues on and on. He recognizes the human desire to locate, or impose, order in space, and then he lets it go.