Jonathan Ryan: The Hour of the Pearl

Los Angeles-based artist Jonathan Ryan’s first solo exhibition at the gallery opening September 12 from 5:00 - 8:00 pm. About Ryan builds his paintings up in oil paint mixed with sand and decomposed granite, so the surface itself has grain and weight to it, closer to a mineral deposit than a painted plane. It’s this same material logic that lets a row of trees read almost as a colonnade of stone in the title painting; the paint doesn’t distinguish between organic and geologic matter, so the two can become deceptively interchangeable. Working from a recurring vocabulary of monumental, uninhabited forms – cone-shaped peaks, sheer canyon walls – Ryan returns to the same compositions, reworking them under different light and atmosphere in the spirit of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series. His studio is stacked with art books, and he draws as well on memories of geologic and architectural formations from places he’s traveled to. These disparate references churn together in Ryan’s studio and imagination, providing building blocks upon which his singular vision is built. No figure appears in Ryan’s landscapes, but the sun and moon perform a figure’s role: they cast the long shadows that make the terrain feel occupied, watched, or waiting for something to happen. That psychological charge recalls the mood of de Chirico’s metaphysical piazzas, paired with a different sensibility drawn from Ken Price – his eye for Southern California’s own strange topography, its deserts and mountains, which Ryan remakes here into forms that feel geologic and invented at once. Read more Toggle Installation