Bruce McCall is a visionary and special artist, closely connected to The New Yorker magazine, for which he painted about 75 covers.
I found his way of “making art” extremely interesting, pinched by a retro-futuristic style that cannot fail to be appreciated for its clean and full lines at the same time. His work, which he defines as technoarchaeology, is to dig into the past to find futures that have never happened and declaring that he must invent the words that describe them, because they do not exist. And then he imagines them, paints them and makes us dream about them. He works in what he defines as “retrofuturism”, which consists in rediscovering how the future was looked at in the past. We were invariably wrong, so I thought back to how in the 1980s we imagined a 2000s now upon us with flying cars and robots that never arrived. Who knows why we have always dreamed of a technology that will hinge our near future, instead of accompanying it with grace…
Advertising is often present in the art of the visionary McCall, but for a very different purpose than expected: he says he uses these images for denigratory purposes. “It’s a form of revenge,” he explained in an interview. Too bad it’s hard to believe, because he would have been an extraordinary creative director. I’d be curious to know how McCall views modern illustrators, who do exceptional work in Photoshop and Illustrator, without ever having picked up a paintbrush.
Cities and cars are McCall’s favorite subjects, but it is not uncommon to find divertissements that alternate animals, humans and scenes of ordinary metropolitan life. Sometimes, it seems like you can see his characters walking from one side of their cover to the other, inviting the viewer to come in. Ah, what I would give to be able to do that and immerse myself in that confused and sparkling context that winks at tomorrow while holding the past by the hand. A bit like the old posters that advertised hydrolyte using a beautiful smile.
I am deeply fascinated by this timeless 87-year-old with a wonderful white beard, who has traveled decades of history, simply by observing it with the curious eyes of the young, inexperienced old sage. Because McCall is everything and nothing, the living contradiction of an art now on its last legs, for amateurs only, struggling to stay afloat among pixels, electrical impulses and buttons that make beep. An art that needs to be explained and that is not always understood, that needs to be interpreted and that in the end we make mistakes. An art that smells of disruptive innovation, that goes hand in hand with canvases full of fingerprints and squeezed tubes of paint like those of toothpaste. In the end, printed on the digital edition of the latest magazine.
Who knows, maybe he too, like Stelfie, is a time traveler, but he comes from the past. Smile, McCall, always smile; who knows, maybe one day your amused face will be discovered, painted on an old poster from the near future or on an electronic device from a distant year now gone by.
Valeria Bellobono
