Futility Helmets

Introduction by Phil King, Editor of Turps Magazine

It was always the most delinquent and unruly kids at school who joined the army. Discipline is a form of container, MacGregor exploits this realisation in his paintings to develop a kind of thoughtful militaristic comedy which is able to focus and embody a sort of hapless 'falling apart'. The world that he creates is based on his experience living in Bolivia and representing the life of an army Boot Camp there in a straightforwardly representational manner. Back home, as studio time has passed, this tidy, contained, world has collapsed and mutated, broken out.

Painting has become a kind of 'putting back into the box' discipline, any desertion will be punished – such dynamics become, in MacGregors work, an opportunity for a darkly hilarious and multiplying dramatics, one that fills his paintings with a surreal animation. Figures burst out and climb back in, everything is absurd slapstick in which boundaries are broken and repurposed, in which coordinated scale loses its grip. But the humour and absurdity and play has a painful edge, pathos is the rule in these worlds in which dancing becomes marching about and vice versa. 

The red ground of these painting shows though – and so a larger intuition of Red Mars God of War murmurs implicit and inexorable. Raw meat unruliness is disciplined and discipline becomes the inspiration for yet more unruliness, each force camouflages the other in paintings whose strange outlandish nature achieves victory over itself somehow. An oddly thunderous grandeur imposes itself, capturing ground from consoling humour – throwing us out with the bathwater – but then we are off again trying to clamber onboard this world's tattered tropical martial law – trying to get in step with the beat of its different drums. 

His gift is that he is somehow able to make this sad, vivid, Tropicana feel part of a larger social collapse and desperation for control, lucidly, and critically, part of the dregs of a lost Colonial Empire at whose heart Mars still beats remorseless.