Paul Ryan, "Lift here and be happy"
Ron Johnson
Paul Ryan’s exhibit "lift here and be happy" utilizes appropriated images from fashion magazines to execute his vibrant and enticing paintings. Ryan combs through magazines looking for fashion photographs to use, but it is not the image or the product that he is interested in, it is the negative and positive spaces created. Ryan then photocopies the chosen images and carefully cuts the shapes out. The shapes are then placed on a stretched, primed canvas and traced. The traced shapes are painted with two separate colors. Ryan utilizes a thin wash of paint to cover the flat, two-colored spaces, calculatingly revealing the brush mark. The thin, translucent brush marks suggest movement and cast a veil over the original painted shapes. The patterned marks, rich with color, are ignited by the distinct brushed-on paint.
The seven paintings on view in this exhibit, each unique, each telling a story, are "read" from left to right like a page in a magazine or book. The long cinematic panels–all but one measuring 90 x 12 inches–enhance this reading. The reading changes when viewed from a closer or farther position.
The remaining painting, introducing attention, the most recent in the exhibit, also measures 90 inches long, but is 18 1/2 inches tall. It separates itself by size, image and the use of three colors. The sparseness of the painted shapes is unlike the other canvases. With introducing attention, as with the other newer work, Ryan seems to be giving more importance to color and space. The story is changing.
At times, the works remind me of Warhol’s Camouflage paintings. Those paintings refer to pattern and design and address the history of landscape painting. In Warhol’s Camouflage paintings he confronted issues of simplifying and abstracting nature. Ryan, like Warhol, is simplifying and abstracting an appropriated image. But the appropriation of the human figure in Ryan’s paintings is further abstracted by inserting the images into a cinematic, landscape-oriented canvas.
With no mention of a critique of "fashion culture," the images gathered are merely tools for the execution of his paintings. The negative and positive, cropped images bare no resemblance to their former function, a function of so-called beauty and commodities. Once highly-manicured photographs of constructed scenes are now unrecognizable parts of an elaborate puzzle, a puzzle that Paul Ryan has eloquently put back together.
