“A mosaic of boredom, a masterful rendering of the disappointed longing and the incongruities of a dolce far niente.”
- Ernst Bloch on Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884.
Jack Ryan’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Drawings, presents seven framed works on paper. Products of a master draughtsman, the works on view are selections from Ryan’s extensive collection of preparatory sketches for oil paintings. Tracing an uncannily familiar landscape of urban life, these pointillist renderings hover on the brink of dissolution. They are atomized street scenes collected like so much flotsam on the shore.
General to the point of ennui, these depictions of homes, street corners and parked automobiles chart an anti-utopian vernacular. A humble, intelligent technician, Ryan crafts “Monday pictures,” images emanating from the quiet walk to work - moments of serenity before the machines churn.
Ryan’s vacated scenes are closer to sensual projections from a simulation than a transcription of real space, elegaic tableaus like depopulated video game environments. Less critical than broodingly contemplative, Ryan’s images float like intangible murmurs, his delicate, formal sensitivity bringing attention to the fragility of our perceptual faculties. These images feel like the final frame of a film, their latent glow lingering on eyelids, the last thing we see.
Jack Ryan (b. 1990, Apple Valley, MN) lives and works in New York City. Recent exhibitions include Loess, Baader-Meinhof (Omaha); A New Museum’s Triennial, FR MOCA (Fall River); Coagulation, Baader-Meinhof (Omaha) and Aniara, 15 Orient (New York). A forthcoming solo exhibition, Spectator, will open at The Meeting (New York) on September 16, 2023.
