Spreading the word: Colin McCahon: Thomas Crow talks with Maria Bloem - curator Maria Bloem discusses the Colin McCahon paintings exhibited in A Question of Faith - Interview

MB: McCahon's paintings all have a performative quality. It's especially clear in Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha [1969-70], because in all the different letter styles you see McCahon enacting different voices. Again I recall how important the Kaprow performance was for him: He's trying to impart performance to painting. He doesn't need real actors because he can use the writing as an actor in an entirely visual way. Pollock comes to mind, in the sense of a holistic painting, covering the whole surface with a kind of web. McCahon's writing does something similar, and his handwriting changed according to the paint he used, with the late works using easily flowing, fast-drying acrylics.

TC: A few years after he comes back from America, he completes a series of paintings he calls "Gates," most of which use glossy, hardware-store enamels, such as he might have seen in Pollock's work. But they don't exhibit any obvious correspondence to advanced American painting.

MB: These works are much more complex than they seem at first view, being at once a metaphorical response to what McCahon perceived to be the enormous challenge posed to humanity by the early '60s cold war threat of nuclear annihilation and, at the same time, an artist's response to the technical challenge of finding a way beyond the two-dimensional picture plane.

TC: One of the paintings from this period that riveted my attention bears the Inscription "Here I give thanks to Mondrian." The rectangular form Is embedded In a relatively flat space, very shallow and planar, done In that glossy enamel. But the rectangle is set diagonally into the picture plane, and Mondrian abhorred any deviation from the horizontal and the vertical. The way that the square is set into the picture, here and elsewhere in the series, more strongly recalls Malevich's White Square. McCahon seems to put into play a whole set of ironies about this tradition of geometric abstraction--especially when one is aware that he'd said to his students, "How do you go on painting after Mondrian?"

MB: It's exactly that. For McCahon, this was a deeply felt challenge. Although Mondrian painted the square grid, McCahon responded by exploring it at an angle. That was the only way to get around the problem. He saw Mondrian like Michelangelo: "the painting to end all painting." Malevich had the black square hanging in the corner of his room on the angle. McCahon combined those things, always choosing those painters--Mondrian and Malevich, for example--who had declared a utopian vision of the future.

TC: These paintings are also directly linked to the series-one of which Is on the cover of your exhibition catalogue--where McCahon introduced a text from Christ's Passion. In Christ's moment of doubt and despair on the cross, the onlookers think they hear Him call upon Elias, or Elijah, the ninth-century BC Hebrew prophet believed to have escaped death, and they ask, Will Elias come to save him? But they misunderstand. Christ is speaking out to his Father: "Eloi, Eloi, why have you forsaken me?" In their minds, Christ is succumbing to a kind of cowardice, not addressing his Father, the divine aspect of His self. It's almost a Monty Python moment, but it's there in the gospel of Matthew, and It occurs at the exact moment of Christ's death (this also being the "cry" that Newman treated as absolute). In that this body of work precedes the greater formality and intellectualization of the "Gates," do you see the "Elias" paintings as transitional too?