Some say they see poetry in my paintings: I see only science fiction
— Gary McMillan

Of course, Gary didn’t say that, but he might well have. All painting negotiates a vulnerable line between science and fiction, between material fact and illusion, between reason and irrationality and Gary McMillan’s paintings willfully embrace these contradictions, as indeed did the grand paintings of Georges Seurat.

Their shared desire to atomise both the process of making and the action of seeing, simultaneously acknowledges the science of sight and the faith one places in vision.

Indeed, the notion of “having a vision” is necessarily a concession to faith over rationality and making a painting may be much the same… particularly using pointillism as a methodology. Seurat’s 19^th century proto-pixelation of the picture plane declared his stated commitment to method over any other intention, and yet he also acknowledged the potency of a world revealed by the play of light when he said — “let’s go and get drunk on light again — it has the power to console,” less a statement of a scientist than a romantic.

Were it 1884, Gary McMillan might well have packed his beret, easel and tiny brushes and joined Seurat on a hazy summer day in the park in Paris, but 140 years later McMillan finds himself victim of a newer seductive chromoluminarism… cinema. There was time when McMillan’s paintings expressed his enthusiasm for film noir and science fiction by relying heavily on their image selection, but this new suite of paintings City in Progress, all still titled ‘scenes’ in a direct reference to cinema, break a little more with this narrative bind and allow for the possibility that the methodology he and Seurat employ(ed) leaves sufficient gap for the unexpected, the magical (aka ‘art’) to get in.

There is no doubt that McMillan looks at the world through a personal viewfinder, cropping and distorting, refracting and splicing frames when desired. What is consistent across each of the paintings is the agitated, atomic field of visual data that fragment and cohere like our memory, painting a picture that is equal part fact and fiction albeit with a garnish of fantasy. There will always be traces of evasion in McMillan’s work, a kind of “on the run” escapism that insinuates that neither vision nor the highway offer complete security.