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Artist David Ryan’s layered paintings, assembled from laser-cut sheets of medium-density fiberboard, represent an inspired twist on the Pop Abstraction purveyed by certain other artists who, like Ryan, graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ Master of Fine Arts program within the last 10 years. With one of his paintings accepted into MoMA last year, Las Vegas’ Tim Bavington represents the most lauded among this elite group, whose members have gone on to find patronage in major cities around the world. |
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Artist David Ryan’s layered paintings, assembled from laser-cut sheets of medium-density fiberboard, represent an inspired twist on the Pop Abstraction purveyed by certain other artists who, like Ryan, graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ Master of Fine Arts program within the last 10 years. With one of his paintings accepted into MoMA last year, Las Vegas’ Tim Bavington represents the most lauded among this elite group, whose members have gone on to find patronage in major cities around the world.
Ryan, however, is no newcomer to the larger contemporary art scene, and has clearly left that hopeful-yet-makes-no-promises, “emerging artist” classification behind. Last spring, Galerie Jean-Luc and Takako Richard in Paris included Ryan, as well as Bavington and Las Vegas artists Yek and Thomas Burke, in a show titled, appropriately, “Pop Abstraction in Las Vegas.” All four of Ryan’s roughly four to five-foot in diameter paintings sold, despite cautionary advice given to him by the gallerist not to get his hopes up too much, owing to Parisian collectors’ methodical—as opposed to impulsive—approach to art buying. Nearly simultaneously, Ryan’s work appeared in a show in London, as the result of a partnership between his Los Angeles gallery, Mark Moore and London’s Rokeby.
His paintings pair organic references with dynamic descriptors: amoeba, seed and embryo are aptly matched with undulating, dividing and orbiting. Sharing in common a mostly white, elliptical outer surface, these paintings comprise anywhere from six to ten or more discrete pieces assembled together in multiple layers, with narrow cracks and wider channels between them revealing bold colors beneath. The effect is otherworldly and evocative; it can be vaguely like watching an exotic bird resplendent in its fully mature, adult plumage in the process of hatching out of an egg.
Of course, it’s ludicrous to suggest Ryan’s work has anything to do with fowl or, for that matter, any other representational theme. His paintings are exercises in composition, which he initially designs using a computer illustration program in addition to some technical precision, meticulous assemblage and, finally, revelation. The result is beautiful, but not vapid. It is both lovely and interesting because it suggests so much but reveals, in its crevices and gaps, tantalizingly little. In fact, these vibrating orbs with which Ryan has had such success were the product of the detritus from a now-discarded body of work that he experimented with in graduate school. Scraps of medium density fiberboard left over from his earlier graduate work ended up pushed to one side, stacked up one against the other next to the wall. Suddenly, silhouettes and lines and shadows revealed themselves.
In early Spring 2007, Numark Gallery in Washington, D.C., will show Ryan’s work. For that show, he plans to continue to reevaluate his design practices and is contemplating creating a more cohesive body of work, whereby each individual painting will engage the others hung around it. In the past, Ryan has been satisfied that the similarities among his works provided enough connective tissue, so to speak—so much so that he strove, compositionally, to push them away from one another.
Because of his Las Vegas pedigree, Ryan knows he is equally susceptible to being either more quickly dismissed or more thoroughly embraced, simply because he hails from Las Vegas, that social and civic oddity in the desert. Observers are forever attempting to assign certain attributes to interesting Las Vegas artists: they are influenced by the city’s foundation built on architectural simulacra and vulgar, yet sumptuous artifice. Or perhaps their creative juices run on its unending blinking lights, smog-enhanced sunsets or general willingness to incorporate vice into its everyday social and economic structure. This sort of interpretation is, in large part, a red herring keeping audiences from assessing Las Vegas’ Pop Abstractionists in any meaningful way.
When asked to define the relationship between his work and the city he lives in, Ryan admits being torn; it seems perilous to articulate the aesthetic of a “Las Vegas School” or even to admit there is one. Yet it’s abject denial not to acknowledge that Las Vegas artists are being recognized for purveying a brand of Abstraction deemed more delectable than much of everything else that is out there. For his part, Ryan is still coming to terms with what it means to be where he’s from. Fortunately, his work succeeds on its own merits, dependent on neither the stigma nor the allure of the city its maker inhabits.
