Alex McClurg’s Present opened at The Browsing Room at Downtown Presbyterian Church back in November. The show was aptly titled, as it was a display of the Birmingham, Ala.-based artist’s work that spoke to this moment in contemporary painting. Art is trendy, and trends are pendulous. Content-focused canvases are predictably fading as an inevitable return to formalism reasserts itself. The future of painting is formalist, abstract and uniquely personal, and it looks more like early modernism than midcentury abstract expressionism. McClurg’s geometric, repetitive works are great examples of the formalist burblings at the edges of American painting. And this quiet display, with its muted palette and layered, graphic sensibilities, came through loud and clear.
