Kingdom come

This large, four-part painting by John Reynolds features blocks of small horizontal and vertical marks drawn with oil sticks onto canvas panels. Forming a wall of irregular colour patches, Kingdom Come is a mass of interrupted lines, crosses, squares, and rectangles, which shift and reform across the canvas. The effect is at once dizzying and restful, prosaic and highly suggestive.

Unfulfilled promises
Kingdom Come represents the sly sense of humour in much of Reynolds' work. The painting was conceived as the final work in 'K Rd to Kingdom Come', Reynolds' 2002 retrospective exhibition. As the artist has suggested, 'the title promises some sweeping sense of conclusion, but the work demonstrates a blandly repetitive procedure'. Reynolds teases the viewer with possibilities of meaning both present in and absent from the work itself. All those marks must mean something, but exactly what remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Drawing out the meaning
While Kingdom Come is considered a painting, it is in some ways better described as a drawing on canvas. A concern with mark-making and the possibilities and deceptions of languages are at the heart of Reynolds' work. Kingdom Come illustrates his development from the wall drawings of the early 1990s, such as Plato's Cave, commissioned for the old National Art Gallery building. Large in scale, Kingdom Come is a kind of last word in a number of senses. Plato wrote that images would be banned from his ideal society because they were an illusion: Reynolds' painting makes a virtue of them.