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. Through these material choices we are brought directly into the studio, with both paintings and sculptures serving as time capsules of production.
Although the genesis of the sculptural works are born from the paintings, the two dimensional works have in turn become informed by the sculptures. It is the tape from the molds of the stacked cubes that are used as collage components in the paintings and the canvases that lie beneath them that eventually become the base of the paintings themselves, each feeding the other in a symbiotic sequence, ultimately the paintings and sculptures can be viewed as one in the same. In the case of the sculptures the choice of plaster and the elements combined therein are subject to chance reactions. This is exemplified in Wallace’s large totem sculpture which features a random pattern of rust stains sucked from a chain embedded within the compound. The impressions formed in these molded masses are created by recognizable objects which become obscured in the process of making, they become abstracted even as they remain whole, and what is hidden remains seen.
The stacked sculptures combine Carl Andre’s floor pieces and the serial reproduction of Sol Lewitt with an additional expressionist gesture; Minimalism gone rogue. Wallace also cites Bruce Naumann’s “Mapping The Studio” yet in this case the absence of human presence is ultimately the step from subjecthood to objecthood, from choice to chance. These objects serve as surrogate paintings for the artist, incorporating elements that cannot function in two dimensional space. While reading as sculpture the conversation remains about painting through the artist’s use of shared language and material calling our attention to the mark and to the way that information is gathered and displayed in an aesthetic mise-en-scène.
RYAN WALLACE was born in 1977 in New York, NY. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant awardee. He has exhibited at Marianne Friis Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; The Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, USA; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Frans Masreel Center, Kasterlee, Belgium; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles; and Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto among many others. Wallace lives and works in Brooklyn and East Hampton, New York.
The Gallery will publish a catalogue with an original essay by David Kennedy Cutler.
