Ian McKeever's recent paintings are abstract in the same way spider webs are: though nonfigurative and nonreferential, they reflect patterns drawn from nature. Certain structures and processes become mesmerizing as McKeever spins his various webs and trellises in paint, as sequential applications of viscous materials cascade over his canvases. His method of doing so, its rhythms and surprising subtleties, is compelling. These paintings are compendia of differing, and sometimes opposite, pictorial tendencies, which, rather than being reconcilied, are brought to a point where they begin to reveal certain aspects of the poetics of their essence.
This all happens within the …