Tarn McLean

Rooted in the tradition of non-objective painting, my duochrome works explore the perceptual and emotional potential of pure colour. Each painting is an immersive field, stripped of representational form, allowing colour itself to become the subject. In this space, hue, tone, and surface are not in service to depiction, but are experienced as phenomena: physical, atmospheric, and sensorial.
While my chromatic choices often begin in observation, the resulting works operate independently from their source. Any botanical reference is dissolved into a distilled spectrum, a translation from the complexity of the visible world into a singular chromatic state. This process echoes the digital compression of an image into RGB or hex codes, yet here the purpose is not efficiency but intensification: restoring the weight, depth, and physicality of colour as a full-body encounter.
Informed by the perceptual investigations of Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler and Ellsworth Kelly, and grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of seeing, these works propose colour as both material and experience. They invite sustained looking in a visual culture conditioned to glance and move on. Each duochrome is not about something, it is the thing: a pure sensory field in which perception itself becomes the subject.