Ryan Sullivan
Maccarone, 630 Greenwich Street, New York City
February 10–March 17
I saw Sullivan’s exhibition twice, the first time on the night it opened, and it was almost too much—too much color, depth, material gnarliness; too much weird movement, cracked surface, lump and bump and beautiful scum. The paintings, all of them 84 by 72 inches and arranged in visual trills, in twosomes and in threesomes, seem to be engineered to stick their metaphorical fingers into your brain via your eye sockets and wiggle them around until the sensation is almost unbearable. This is all meant as a compliment. The young painter is enjoying his first solo exhibition, which also includes six smaller works on battered, abused, paint-damaged paper.
Three paintings on one wall of the main gallery are a good place to focus your attention. October 13, 2011–November 5, 2011 (Sullivan’s titles always reference the work’s dates of creation) is an abstract, made, like nearly all of these offerings, by applying layers of oil, enamel, latex, and spray paint onto canvas. Sullivan starts out with the canvas flat on the floor, then props it upright, allowing the paint to morph and move. In this first piece, the image resembles two burst lungs—victims of the droop of gravity—overlaid with streaks of yellow paint. The painting to its right, July 27, 2011–August 1, 2011, is much lighter, with a look reminiscent of fractured ice or glass (or a Marilyn Minter photorealist depiction of the same). And in December 8, 2011–December 16, 2011, most of the surface is taken up by a broken mass of deep red paint interrupted by smudges that could be sampled from a Gerhard Richter.
It’s hard to nail down a taxonomy that incorporates all of Sullivan’s methods, but there are certain types of paintings here. Cracks and sags are both vital. Cracks in the sense of damaged paint, splintered or broken and now sealed in place; sags in the sense of a vertical drag, the remnants of the paint’s struggle to slide down the canvas and onto the floor. You could sit in the gallery for a long time and free associate what images individual works bring to mind: Dried mud, degraded architectural exteriors, digitally skewed photographs. (The exhibition is accompanied by a delightful little volume of snapshots taken by the artist of “real world” things that resemble his abstracts: a car’s deteriorating paint job; masses of gunked-up snow and salt; the various ways tape can pucker and bulge.)
What’s truly weird about these paintings is how beautiful and materially grotesque they can be at the same time—the color-drenched overload of the image, the layered, broken, multifarious surface itself. The result is rough and seductive, not so much eye-pleasing as overwhelming in the most pleasurable way.
This article will appear in the May issue of Modern Painters magazine.