NYAB Event - Joseph Ryan "New Works"

Joseph Ryan "New Works"

Galerie Mourlot

This event has ended.

This exhibition offers an intimate view into the distinctive approach to figuration Joseph Ryan has developed over the past few years. The subject-matter of these new works – images of the artist’s wife and home - is inherently personal. Their medium – most are pencil drawn on paper - is perhaps equally so. Executed on a scale small enough to be held in the hand or propped on the lap, the recent works on paper offer insight into a painterly practice which is, both formally and in its wider implications, inseparable from the act of drawing. At once delicate, searching and cerebral, Ryan’s drawings serve as condensed images of sighted material gathered through several sittings; as visual records of discrete moments seen, sensed and measured in graphite.

The “white” paintings of Ryan’s previous show presented interiors, both empty and inhabited, in which objects and the space between them were articulated in a seeming flurry of close-tone brushstokes. The ethereal strokes of the paintings have here taken on the more concentrated form of dark-on-white pencil marks, and put in special service of delineating the human form in all its solidity, softness and complexity. The tense play between matter and void from the earlier works is here brought to bear on the ambiguities of form itself. With marks that are alternately deliberate and tentatively surrendering, Ryan creates a near-sfumato effect through and around his central feminine figures. The effect arises not from a vague swath or smudge of pigment, but rather as the cumulative outcome of marks made darkly, then lightly, erased and repeated. The result suggests a kind of pictorial margin of uncertainty – an admission, perhaps, of the elusive nature of the human as subject.

Ryan’s work serves as an active reminder that some types of perceptual information are more accurately conveyed through the hand and eye than through a lens; that the processes of selection, invention and emphasis possible through drawing can more closely describe an experience than can the singular vision of a snapshot. The deceptively straightforward poses of the single figure in Ryan’s drawings can, for example, be seen as operating in concert with a succession of formal and pictorial decisions that together serve to evoke a nuanced range of associations. In ‘The White Dress’ a figure clothed in white stands, arms at side and staring straight ahead in a non-descript interior. The image could be called uneventful were it not for the position of the figure against a vertiginously tilted back- plane, and the almost subliminal, yet unmistakable evocation of danger and stoicism created within the pictorial scenario. The same figure, in ‘Wave (or After the Bath)’ suggests a different psychological situation entirely. Here she appears wrapped in softness, from the towel twisting around her hair, to the sheets echoing her form, to her position safely - if seductively - nestled within an undulating composition.

Recalling at once the incisive eye of Degas and the domestic engagement of Bonnard, Ryan has achieved in this show a portrait of interior and everyday life in its full emotional spectrum; its polarities of affection/ isolation, ennui/ adoration. One particularly striking work, ‘Stairs and Bottle’ depicts the artist’s wife seated on a staircase landing beneath the viewer’s vantage point. Her waiting posture is a powerful image of feminine beauty, conveyed as it is amidst the ascending and descending spirals of the surrounding architecture. The rhythmic grace with which she appears to have been seen and recorded here suggests a gesture and a process as natural, and as intimate, as breathing.