““It is precisely through insisting that every scenario convey constriction and every impulse towards motion is circumscribed—the cat-up-a-tree syndrome, we could call it—that McKenna brings his allegory of escape alive. In choosing vulnerability as the point of composition—jumping, balancing, falling, staring, disappearing—McKenna invests the ‘not-muchness’ of each painting with the quality of an involving struggle. It’s as if McKenna looks at the world and is immediately, effortlessly existential. The effort comes in combating dread with care and feeling...“

(excerpt from Noel McKenna by Damien Wilkins, 2005)