RYAN WALLACE

Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present our fifth show with RYAN WALLACE, Leaves Turn Inside You. The exhibition will run from 1 February through 9 March 2024. A reception for the artist will be held Thursday 1 February 2024 from 6 – 8 PM. Like the evolution of language,...

Wallace continues to push his mixed media paintings to conjure an ethereal space between the material and immaterial. The abstract shapes cut from canvas actively work with and against the other by folding, evolving, and repeating across the support. He excavates and manipulates the surface of his works to bring forth a multitude of textures and perspectives. Tiers of oil, acrylic, mylar, aluminum, and copper tape unite to evoke a captivating portal into Wallace’s process and vision.

"Unlanding." Such a curiously immaterial word for a materially dense work. In his new multimedia paintings, Ryan Wallace takes license to untether from former processes and follow a path set out primarily by intuition and experience. Historically each body of work has given rise to the next, with materials and compositions dictated by the previous generation. Elliptical templates used to generate structural components originated from shapes of light cast by reflective media within earlier installations.

Like a patient gardener, Ryan Wallace cyclically tends, gleans, and prunes his work as former efforts become a soil that cultivates the new. His projects are sustained through continuous cycles of creation, destruction, flattening, and rebuilding. In paintings constructed from strips of canvas, screens, tiles, metallic tapes and errant found objects, each piece holds a history of its own making. It is self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, self-determined, in a way that cultivates organic development.

Wallace’s process of abstraction is based in materiality, working methodically back from the detritus left behind in the studio, the ends become the means. The artist delves into the technical and formal properties of abstract painting by creating reliefs that prize texture, light and surface tension. By limiting his palette Wallace makes the medium the message, the works are chromatically minimalist, and materially maximalist.