A walk through Nick Ryan Gallery’s current exhibition, Shapespeak, evokes an abstracted American landscape filled with deserted strip malls, fragmented urban life, and flickering nocturnal visions. Ky Anderson, Emilio Lobato, Andy Ryan, and Courtney Sennish each utilize their own combination of highly specific colors and textures to illuminate the layered complexity of humans’ relationship to our environment, both built and natural.
Ky Anderson’s geometric acrylic paintings move with breezy fluidity within their rectangular confines and familiar colors collide in unexpected ways. Pink stucco might find itself amidst a sea of trusty corporate blues. Anderson’s precise washes of paint offer complex visual depth and space for a delicate kind of contemplation.
The casual brush strokes in Upgrade construct optic magic. Shapes shift across the canvas to settle into their final placements as a sage shadow shrouds the upper quarter of the painting. Well-placed bursts of fresh lemon yellow uplift the surrounding colors, appearing softened by the sun.
While Anderson seems to favor a sun-drenched color palette, she avoids the saccharine by balancing the works with muddy browns and impulsive moments of textured variety, such as the sprinkle of paint freckles at the top of Arches and Stars or the left-hand stack of dark, washy shadows. In her world of disrupted grids, the shadows are never spooky, always serene.
Nearby, Courtney Sennish also plays with abstracted shadows in a segmented sidewalk stack. Ground Indicators recalls the deep shadows produced in late afternoon you encounter while waiting at a crosswalk to pick up a cold beverage from the corner store. Familiar, variegated, yellow-orange bumps of tactile paving wrap around the bottom chunk, like reconfigured urban life.
The piece almost feels as though it’s anticipating a final assembly—like a Rubik’s Cube—but remains balanced in an intriguingly askew stance. Though the label lists concrete, wood, foam, acrylic, and hydrocal as the media, it’s impossible to differentiate the materials without touching the work, resulting in an uncertain center of gravity; a modern megalith in construction.
Society’s precarious preoccupation with the façade appears in Sennish’s other works on view. Ten Bricks settles into an uneasy formation, a set of wayward dominoes hoping that they might add up to something. With art historical precedents such as Beverly Buchanan, Sennish offers a playfully poetic spin on ancient questions about human relationships to the built environment.
Andy Ryan also finds room for mystical play in paintings that meditate on organic shapes from the natural world. Many of the works appear to be painted on a thick, textured paper—like desert sand that thirstily absorbs the enticing jewel tones of the watercolor pigments. In Fizzy Fuzzy, vaguely symmetrical amoebic forms rise over a low horizon. Light emanates from an unknown central source and the shapes rise to the occasion.
The benevolent warmth of the sun washes over many of Ryan’s watercolors. Tender morning yellows and blues fill the background of Tongue Tied, where a pink twist holds up a fleshy expanse of magenta. Sonic waves push towards the edges of the composition in a bid for being heard. Some of his other works seem to exist within a nocturnal place, where oracles gather under the neon glow of the last bar in a forgotten desert town.
Huff, painted in darker tones with glowing white spills and smoke, has contracted a case of themidnight sweats. It’s a wizard dance, a summoning, and it’s a little bit angry. Ryan’s paintings confess that life is a series of colorful collisions.
Emilio Lobato’s mixed media works in the exhibition also exist within the emotionally vulnerable space of the night. Hearsay, collaged with dictionary pages, captures the feeling of thoughts racing while you wait for sleep to shroud the overthinking. Strips of crimson, olive, and inky black paper weave the words and feelings into a memory.
His series of astronomy-inspired nail and rubber works introduce a material solidity to far away visions. Callisto peels the shadows away from the night, revealing a vitally warm core.
Circles often appear in Lobato’s work to keep the visual focus of his abstractions moving, but they also allude to spiritual connections and nature’s cycles. Duo (Twin Feather Meditations) hums with unexpected romance in the meeting of two black circles amidst a deep blood red. A small arrow pierces between them, simultaneously joining and separating, much like the dance of a soulmate connection. The black circles in this work are not voids, but rather a reflective space with the potential to hold everything.
Shapespeak reveals that abstraction is fueled by daily epiphanies, large and small. Whether it’s the uncertain lean of a crumbling brick or the blistering buoyancy of a sunrise, the artists in this exhibition transform their material and environmental inspirations into layered abstract respites from linear thought.
Paloma Jimenez (she/her) is an artist, writer, and teacher. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and has been featured in international publications. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MFA from Parsons School of Design.
