Notes of Persistent Awe
Columns by Benjamin Terrell
2/27/2024 2 Comments #17: 03/01/24On the Work of Jonathan Ryan by Benjamin Terrell Installation view of Jonathan Ryan's Mirage at The Landing Gallery in Los Angeles. Today our most memorable discoveries often come while scrolling and the greatest epics are all streaming. Conquest is rightfully a dirty word; the earth has been googled now for thirty years and our new ruins are what's too large for the recycling bin and what's left behind in the average park block. Even so, unscaled mystery and enigmatic order still abound in places like the work of painter Jonathan Ryan and that's good news because we collectively thrive in new and unknown worlds when we feel historically chosen and challenged to crack a good code. The late art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, "hand made visual art is the only major cultural practice unassimilable by mass media," and that is better news because like the validity of patina stripped from transferring something classic to 4k, truth and beauty are our inheritance to learn from or let go. Hideout 2024, oil and sand on canvas 66" x 70" Look- A painting by Jonathan Ryan starts suspended and peers out from the same perched perspective as a Joseph Yoakhum pencil drawing. For both artists the earth is an epidermis, and we can either be something massive viewing something microscopic or its opposite- we, almost insignificant, hover above something inconceivably infinite and unfolding. Myst 2023, oil, oil pastel, and sand on canvas 50" x 68" A painting by Ryan captures the slow motion of an object becoming monumental, where surface and structure are first sculpted by hand or land, as if a precipice itself could swell into broken numeral shapes just as a reminder - universal order is ultimately unknowable. Crest 2023, oil and sand on canvas, 66" x 70" A painting by Ryan portrays equal parts earth and yearning mind, an intertwined geology and theology that, like environmental artist Robert Smithson writes, "crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reverie." Sandstone Pool 2023, oil and sand on canvas, 14" x 11" For Smithson, art, whether outdoor or a landscape on canvas was always a fragment born from larger fragments, without beginning or end, and therefore capable of containing both future and past. The paintings in “Mirage”, Jonathan Ryan's new show at the Landing Gallery , loom like comparable lands, showing no signs of human neglect and consequently also appear beyond time's measure. Painting monumentality without extremes- no fires, no floods, not swollen with the weight of people, Ryan’s landscape becomes a gameboard free of pieces, where potentiality is restored. This is also the earth as we detach from it, this is mystery returning after we've turned in the keys, this is home seen in the rear-view mirror as we drive away. Confronted by a world that was ours and not ours could lead one to wonder- was this shared existence happening to us or were we happening to it? Ryan's palette temperature and arid otherworldly settings bring to mind fellow contemporary painter, Nat Meade. The same skies dim and dawn on Meade's men- tears with beards who camp with dog eared copies of Robert Bly's Iron John. Men who melt in the shadow of the same crumbling monuments as Ryan’s region. Dust Bowl 2023, oil and sand on canvas, 60" x 50" Ryan's sandstone geometries and soaring drone over water perspectives are reminiscent of artist Harold Ancart's miniature pool sculptures. Flat and shallow, colorful and concrete, Ancart's pools are reluctant containers the size of place mats. The basin for each artist is like the first (Ryan) or last (Ancart) boot print indented into paths abstractly prehistoric or passive postmodern. Built up in texture but also able to glow from below, Ryan’s topography shimmers and simmers like a woodblock print by Hiroyuki Tajima. The Sosaku-Hanga artist built up his blocks with resins and things of the earth as much as he carved into them. The result, like an image of Ryan’s, is a mirroring of the luminosity of above and below where sitting center, the artwork sifts like soil in a sluice box. Emerald Pool 2023, oil and sand on canvas, 11" x 14" The paintings in “Mirage” function as a kind of double Dune, they are deserted and of desert settings but also appear made from the gritty granules of barren lands. Dustbowl rises like a staircase sandcastle, absent are the acrobatics of human ego and in its place is pure expansiveness- a would be worldliness unencumbered by human ascending. Golden Hour nods to video games, an open world obstacle course made for armchair explorers. Both paintings soar to a high unpopulated plane of creativity that musician Robert Fripp speaks of, “Once we cast aside all our demands and expectations..the direct experience of engaging is readily available, if we can get ourselves out of the picture.” Cross 2020, oil and sand on canvas, 18" x 15" These landscapes aren’t puzzles or dialects asking for deciphering, they are the subtle utterings of an artist showing the earth to itself. Ryan intuits something eternal yet always new- this world belongs not to us but to all of the beauty we leave behind. The earth inspires us so that in reciprocity we would create and in our creation it sees itself reflected. We, the only ones capable of such destruction, disconnection are also the only species capable of such devotion. We, who the earth bends in persuasion like light is bent by temperature that results in a mirage. We, the mirror holders of life’s greatest illusions.
2 Comments
"The idea of 'persistent awe' really resonates with me. In our daily lives, it's easy to get caught up in the mundane and forget the wonders that surround us. But I believe it's important to cultivate a sense of awe, to find those moments that remind us of the universe's vastness and beauty, the power of nature, or the simple miracle of existence. These experiences can be grounding and inspiring, and they can help us appreciate the world in a fresh way."
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