John Moore: Charcoals
Locks Gallery
600 S. Washington Square
Philadelphia
Feb. 18, 2025
If there’s one architectural motif I’ve come to associate most closely with Pennsylvania, it’s smokestacks. As our image of Philadelphia expands into late capitalist contemporaneity, the state’s industrial past remains a familiar fixture forever visible on the city’s skyline.
Factory chimneys were also the first feature I noticed in artist John Moore’s portraits of post-industrial America. Over the past few months, Locks Gallery has been rotating collections of the prolific local artist and University of Pennsylvania professor’s work from 1970 through today. The retrospective is a rare opportunity to observe an artist's shifting portrayals of our slow-burning life spans.
On display now are two side-by-side showings of John Moore’s variant styles. There’s “Portals,” an exhibit of classic oil paintings that synopsize Moore’s thematic interest in detailing erosion to illustrate the passage of time. And then there’s “Charcoals,” an alternative collection of black and white insight into Moore’s more recent attempts to grapple with the gradient beauty of our modern, mixed-use state of mind.
For decades, Moore has refashioned the functional signage of society — water towers, doorways, windows, railroads — into high art. His depictions of cyclical flues are perhaps the most potent “portal” he’s offered us between our recent past and present. Three images in particular, crafted in 1972, 1988 and 2022, showcase Moore’s changing visions of the anthropocene through his distinct studies of smokestacks.
Moore emerged in the late sixties as a revivalist of realist portraiture. During the age of abstraction and the advent of pop art, Moore developed a synthesist style of composition that focused on counterposing the fading integrity of old industrial structure against modern evidence of human existence.
An early glimpse into Moore’s artistic outlook can be seen through his 1972 still life of domestic trinkets observed against the sunset of the industrial age. The painting is a clear-cut sign of the times. Moore utilizes geometric technique to document the baby girl pink and terracotta of an earthy seventies’ aesthetic manufactured through objects like floral-printed water glasses. In the background is a hazy silhouette of a factory, its pipes echoing the anonymous piques of blue mountains in the distance. There’s a sense of dusty grandeur reminiscent of a Grand Canyon postcard.
Another painting of a factory from 1988 is more literal in scope. The factory is no longer the narrative background, but rather the sole subject of Moore’s interest. Moore showcases a bolder adherence to the art of realism, asserting the identity of a factory yard through subdued but occlusive shades of blue, red and gray. There’s a precise persistence of form, an urging of the audience to pay attention to the abandoned roots of our reality during a new decade of neon glamor and American idealism.
Moore’s current charcoal studies, seen in the context of his other work, are the most compelling advance in the artist’s career. One landscape sketched in 2022 offers a multilayered scene that repositions the factory into the middle of a mixed-use neighborhood, embracing a fresh medium to smudge our current sense of stratification into a similarly unreal — and yet highly intricate — picture. Vines around an ornate fence make up an ominously constricting foreground belying a crowded expanse of first yuppy picnic tables in a manicured park, then a cloudy midground of black factory pipes, and finally a skyline of suburban sprawl.
The drawing recalls a 1940s brand of cohesive optimism, as told through tidy black and white neighborhood caricatures. But evident in the image is a sense of fleshed-out perspective and self-awareness. Whereas Moore’s oil paintings and hardened realism extracted the deadening flatness of an America increasingly isolated from its means of production, this later stylistic retelling is somehow more lively in its recognition of ongoing humanity. The fuzzy integrity of charcoal shows a world that has swallowed so much smoke that it is, indeed, made of the stuff; and, still, people walk through corridors crafted through the waste. It is a nearly nostalgic elegy to our former ways of seeing and being that simultaneously welcomes the new vistas we’ve come to inhabit.
The beauty of Moore’s observations arrive not just in the careful attention he’s paid to the artifacts of our species, but through the obvious evolution of his own point of view as a person living through an awkward century of both rapid growth and stalled progress. Moore has manufactured his own synthetic method of seeing the world. While helping to resurrect the outdated notion of realism, he’s also brought back an abandoned logic of life: We can face the facts and still find room for romance. Some might view Philly's smokestacks as an eyesore, but they promise permanent sight lines amid the consuming interest of chaos.
