ABOUT THE PAINTINGS OF KEVIN MELCHIONNE
Obelisks, cairns, and pagodas, yet also highways, satellite dishes, and billboards? Why the combination?
The landscapes are places of retirement for monks, hermits, and poets. But they can also be seen as development sites managed by regional tourist coordinators and provincial highway engineers seeking improved access to ancient pilgrimage sites or modern cell phone towers. The images are romantic constructions, full of follies, promontories, and prospects. These tropes of romanticism stand alongside retaining walls, radio towers, and billboards.
It is as if the scenes were to be prepared for a fête galante on a warm summer evening. But, instead, they have been hastily decorated with lines of pennants more commonly seen at auto dealerships. My paintings are attempts to conjure the yearnings of romanticism in the context of a world which can’t always rise to the occasion. So the celebration may have romantic ambitions but the decorations have been provided by a party supply super-store.
 Together, they conjure, for me at least, a romantic pathos balanced by a comic undercurrent.
Why romanticism?
Romanticism is simply a belief in the importance of extraordinary experience in the good life. The romantic is in search of experience. The lack of credibility of romantic aspiration in the contemporary world does not disqualify this aspiration. Romantics still have to go out amidst the hotels and condos in search of experience. These paintings are commentaries on the quest, not the quest itself.
Why the hills?
If you look at the history of landscape painting, painters have always climbed hills to get better prospects of the surrounding countryside. With these paintings, I move down into the valley in order to get a better view of the hill. For me, it is the summit and the path more than the view itself that speaks to the romantic impulse. I am after the trek to the top of the hill, more than the view upon attaining it.
Everywhere in the world, the tops of hills, especially when those hills stand alone, are infused with a special status through human activity. Cairns, memorials, monasteries have been built upon them and today these constructions retain their attraction as leisure-time destinations.
But the hill also appeals to me compositionally. As many art historians have observed, the great thing about pre-renaissance landscape painting, prior to the adoption of linear and atmospheric perspective, is the way that the landscape rises naively from the foreground, allowing the viewer to see what is known or imagined to lie in the distance. The possibility of pictorial narrative comes out of that manipulation of the landscape. But, once you set that option aside, for whatever reasons, the landscape compresses and runs off into the distance. The use of the hill as an ongoing motif allows me to flatten out the picture and use the whole canvas again. Anything can be on the hill. The hill is just a different way to create pictorial space for the same narrative impulse.
 Some parts of the paintings strike me as very naturalistic, others more like fantasy. Some are even painted with a naiveté approaching folk art. How do you reconcile that?
Figurative painting, any painting that depicts in even the slightest way, is inevitably a dialogue between style and description. No matter how much of a stylist the painter is, the question of the adequacy of the rendering is always there, no matter how much we wish to assert that the painting lives in the realm of the imaginary. Conversely, the most impeccably realistic painter is always confronted with the problem of style, of providing a distinctive, personal solution to the technical problems of painting. Abstract painting greatly reduces the technical problem. But, for most artists, it is still there in the form of something like “structure” or “unity.”
Pictorial description does not exist independently of style. To a degree, style is an approach to description. But never entirely. Sometimes style is just style, free from what depiction might require. So, I find myself making countless individual decisions about style and perception. When painters do that, they situate themselves on this perceptual continuum. But you don’t have to situate yourself in the same place all the time. And, if you look carefully, most really good painters don’t.
So, if someone comes upon a painting of mine and is perplexed by something in it, I try to figure out whether they are looking at the painting through the same rhetorical lens as I am. Sometimes, after I put on their glasses, I change the painting. At others, I have to live with their confusion.
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