Don Cook and Kevin MacDonald at Creative Alliance

Art in America, Sept, 2006 by J.W. Mahoney

Friends for over 20 years, Maryland-based painters Kevin MacDonald and Don Cook have been transforming our vernacular culture, from old neighborhoods to new movie theaters, into quiet, deadpan images with undercurrents of folk legend, as seen in "City Stories," their recent two-person exhibition.

Cook's paintings (all 2005) are fantasies that evoke stills from an imaginary mid-century American film noir. His night cityscapes are colored in sharply defined blue and black, like panels in a comic strip sometimes are, and their titles are included in the compositions. Underbelly is constructed around the triangular beam of a streetlight, which highlights the entrance of a rounded modernist building. Behind it stand more linear structures--factories or apartment houses. The word Underbelly is centrally painted in blue capital letters across the lower edge. The untold story here is both of a moral darkness implied by the title, and a drama the image conceals or awaits.

Cook's other works, also unpopulated, offer equally ominous suggestions of a nocturnal world steeped in hidden purpose: an empty street in which A Pedestrian Vanishes, or an industrial building whose sign reveals a word cut off by shadow, with just the letters "FLUORES" visible, in a painting titled An Eternity of Sunshine. In its night sky, four points of light could be planets, fireworks or the headlights of a police helicopter.

In MacDonald's painting series "Mysteries of Silver Spring," the mysteries, remaining carefully intact, are located in quiet urban spaces. Light-filled pictures of Silver Spring, Md., they are apparently straightforward studies of corporate and commercial buildings in that Washington, D.C., exurb. The sunlight is bright and even, and as constant as the evident silence. There are no human figures, no traffic and no clutter. In Silver Spring (2004), a defunct single-story shopping plaza with a parking lot displays the signs of closed businesses above an array of whited-out windows. Three multistory modern office buildings rise in the near distance, under a cloudless blue sky. We read, in red letters, "Irving's Sport Shops," "Beauty Supply" and "Fast Tax Service" as epitaphs and markers of memory.

MacDonald's work has always been respectfully realistic, but his intentions can be as metaphysical as Giorgio de Chirico's, transubstantiating a familiar or recognizable image into the reality we see in dreams. Curator Jed Dodds suggests that MacDonald has "inherited the luminosity of the Washington Color School painters," and, indeed, his art has consistently valued light as symbolically as theirs did.

In "City Stories," Cook and MacDonald have exploited the sublimities in "unnatural" environments to create a preternatural immanence in ordinariness. The mysteries in these paintings are successfully hidden in plain sight, giving the works both visual transparency and a tantalizingly dramatic obliqueness.--J. W. Mahoney