Autoluminescent

A shop window dressed with formal clothing glows on a street corner. Before it, a man stands on the sidewalk, and closer still to the painting’s surface is a car on which another man and woman lean. The couple, it seems, might be enjoying music, as might the standing man. It’s almost as if the scene were a comical skit transcribed from a television show: Characters spontaneously dance on street, backed by laughing track. But it’s also possible that the upright man, hands on head, hair swept back, is having an episode all his own, so very far away from his surroundings. As much as one might look, there is a part of the picture that, even as it comes close to easy emotional relief, remains unsettlingly distant, holding up the empty expanse between the extraordinary and the everyday, mystery and knowing, the aleatory and the analytic. And it appears that, behind the shop, in the painting’s more remote background, the color of that distance is red.

I see the diptych, Midland formal (2025), by Travis MacDonald for the first time at the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based painter’s Tempelhof studio. It’s early morning. The nearest café is miles away. MacDonald makes coffee and invites me to join him for a cigarette at a large window that overlooks the neighboring sandblasters’, where two men are at work, blasting. We watch on unnoticed. After excusing the lack of comforts in the room, MacDonald begins to pull paintings out of hiding. “I’ve been thinking about idols,” he tells me. “Main characters and supporting characters – a cast of people, like in a long-running sitcom. I make episodes, take a still, and it just doesn’t end.”

But it does begin. And that episode, I learn, sitting at a makeshift desk opposite MacDonald, was set on the North Island of New Zealand, in the small inland town of Bunnythorpe, where the artist was born in 1990. His mother, Kathryn McCool, was a photographer, and his father, Craig MacDonald, worked at an abattoir and as a technician for New Zealand sculptor Paul Dibble. A meaningful event came early. When MacDonald was all but six, his father, on an upskilling assignment for Dibble, relocated the family to the even smaller Australian town of Elphinstone, population 200. “Growing up, there was a general atmosphere of homesickness,” the artist says. For one, he missed all the greenery.

At a great distance from any major art institution, MacDonald nonetheless spent a good deal of time flipping through his parents’ few art magazines and books, bringing those discovered ideas into dialogues with his mother. “She would be working, driving around and looking for scenes to photograph, and I would sometimes tag along,” he says. “It was as if we were casting for a film. It’s how I learnt to look, not critically but analytically.” That analytic vision today plainly directs the composition of MacDonald’s paintings: in Midland Formal, for example, in the distances all so sharply defined, and in Gift of the moment (2025), whose basic forms – rectangles, squares, circles – also fall into frame with the expressive geometry of the likes of Kazimir Malevich.

Music, too, was a way outside of Elphinstone for the teenage MacDonald. Drawn to punk and rock and roll, he began to regularly make the one-and-a-half-hour train ride to Melbourne, where he played in bands inspired by Flying Nun, the fabled New Zealand record label. Eventually he relocated to the cultural center, studying fine art at the city’s Victorian College of the Arts, and he continued with his music. This period was as serious as it was short lived. By 26, MacDonald had, “in a self-flagellating kind of way,” thrown in the Melbourne music scene. “I didn’t want to stop, but I needed to focus on painting,” he says, rising from the table and making his way across the studio to another stack of works. But while he left the scene, he didn’t depart the show, even as he later relocated to Europe. The Basel exhibition, for instance, is titled Autoluminescent, after a song by Australian post-punk legend Rowland S. Howard, and the artist will quietly confess that, from time to time, he still records music in private.

MacDonald, now with a painting in hand, holds it first in front of other works, then briefly in the sunlight streaming in from the windows. In this moment of silence, the thing seems to almost produce its own light, to glow from within. At my astonishment, the artist allows himself a quick smile. “Silk,” he says. While the use of the material in painting is certainly not new – it dates back to ancient Asian art, selected for reasons of economy – MacDonald brings out an overlooked quality: translucence. As light so magnificently pervades both pigment and textile, one wonders why, outside of Edgar Degas’s Fan paintings, the photophilic Impressionists did not make more use of the fabric as substrate.

Yet, it is more fitting, when we talk about MacDonald, to talk about the Nabis. The post-Impressionists of the late-nineteenth century had a fondness for the symbolic, for lifting meaning out of reality, and MacDonald’s recurring trees, wheels, and metal structures fall into this domain, despite the artist’s reluctance to speculate on their significance. As well, glimmers of Pierre Bonnard appear all around the studio, and especially, I soon find, in MacDonald’s use of the photograph. Like Bonnard, he views it as a material to mediate, to arrange. “The photos don’t translate immediately to a painting,” he says, pointing to the analytic aspect of his work. “I construct the images. They have to be rebuilt.” Some photographs he takes himself, using his phone, and others he selects from Instagram Stories, a medium he admits often sets alight his jealousy. “I’m screen-shotting all these stories of my friends doing the things I wish I was doing, having fun. But I’m not there. I’m here, wherever this is,” he says, shrugging at the studio, “inside a painting.” The works are in a way addressed to the jealousy that arises in the distance MacDonald has from his pals, who, in their broadly described expressions, in their aloofness, convey the anticipation and excitement found in a good night out – the aleatory sense that anything could happen.

That is one method or two. But sometimes, the artist tells me, writing can prefigure the photograph. In this channel, he describes in great detail, using the Notes application on his phone, what would make a good painting, what hasn’t been painted before, basing those observations on things either seen or imagined. Sentences in hand, he searches the Internet for images to, in his words, “reverse engineer” the painting, collaging together a constructed scene. And occasionally, with yet another nod to the Nabis and their democratic spirit, the found image is printed and pasted straight onto the painting itself. Through it all, the aspect of analytic assemblage is ever-present.

Two more paintings of the same motif, displayed by MacDonald one on top of the other, catch my attention – Crowdsurfer I and Crowdsurfer II. Rendered in shades of red and yellow, a lanky, long-haired man lies on his back, crowd surfing above a sea of hands, recalling the supine Jesus in Hans Holbein’s The body of the dead Christ in the tomb. But while the “Dripping Man,” as the artist calls him, is put in the place of the Son of God, or of the idol – the distant figure to which, MacDonald reminds me, painting has always been in service – it’s clear that he does not possess the same immaculate qualities. “I’m aggrandizing and heroizing the underconfident, the depressive, the gravity-stricken,” the artist says, rolling another cigarette. I think of MacDonald and his mother in the car in the countryside, and back at the studio window, him and I both reminisce about growing up as long-haired louts on the other side of the world, where to have hair past the collar was to be considered gay or a hippy or both. “There’s the sociological part,” he says, “but the Dripping Man is also a way of breaking the geometry, formally speaking.”

Where one finds “the Drip,” one finds the meddling of materiality. The analytic is upset by the aleatory, and not only in the character’s outer appearance. Gravity, as MacDonald hinted, has also played a role in his becoming – “Paint should be wet,” he says as we watch the two working men get back to their sandblasting. In Jumbo vision (2025), lingering just behind his friends and yet positioned center stage, the sappy man is painted in this way, resembling a drip and really dripped, intruding on the linear aspect of the buildings and bridge and the road beneath, speeding away to a vanishing point. Admittedly a bit embarrassed by his subtle drips, MacDonald, in using them among his rule-abiding geometries, gracefully brings chance into the picture. Anything could happen, and perhaps that could be something new, but perhaps not.

“In a way, doubt is the most important variable in painting,” MacDonald tells me, putting out his cigarette. It’s a burdensome emotion that either paralyses or drives, that outlines the expanse between what is known and what is not. “Doubt and devotion, they go hand in hand,” he continues. “And to devote myself to painting is a way to explain things to myself.” Where he differs from the Nabis, what makes him contemporary, is precisely his personal contextualization of the world and of the painterly tradition. He will not be writing any Définition du néo-traditionnisme, no manifesto. Travis MacDonald is devoted to painting for himself alone, and done his way, in the distance between the many articulations of the aleatory and analytic, one is taken into the painting to perhaps feel in themselves the kinds of things the artist feels – and to perceive his art and art history in a new light, at the same time both social and aesthetic.

Given the exhibition’s title and content, and knowing something of MacDonald’s life, it’s hard not to see the paintings in Autoluminescent as scenes from the artist’s earlier Melbourne days, stills from the series finale. The house parties and the hierarchies; the gossip and the drama. But it’s also MacDonald and his mother in the car again, chancing upon and giving form to the idols in the countryside. “The old notion of just depicting or observing,” he says, “this passiveness is relevant. And that’s all we’re left with now. The simple things.”