After a point that is passed without being seen /
more and more of the going appears to /
be going back but that is another /
cloud shadow there was never any such /
dwelling […]
W. S. Merwin, “Mirage” (1992)
Willowing striations of sand emanate from a voided cross. Vibrant skies slip into dawn or dusk. Curling, snakelike clouds hug a pathway to a blood moon. A labyrinthine nonplace opens its floor to the sky, to glowing stars. French gardens, desert floors, and racetracks condense into planes floating through space. Such images coalesce throughout Mirage, a series of new oil and sand paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Jonathan Ryan. His fourth solo presentation with the gallery, the exhibition features work situated between earth and ether, the concrete and the liminal.
Like mirages, Ryan’s paintings project images of a reality that is out of joint. Each composition contains recognizable landscape elements – hills, trees, suns and moons – but configures them beyond naturalism. For instance, a lone, geologic form protrudes from flat fields dotted with perfectly triangular fir trees in Dust Bowl, while repeating archways radiate like rainbows in the desert landscape of Arches. Throughout, reflections are both teased and rejected by Ryan’s compositions: Emerald Pool, for example, either depicts a recessed pool reflecting the moon, or a sky-facing window bathed in golden night light.
Previously, Ryan’s practice was more firmly rooted in the lineages of land art, op art, and geometric abstraction. In recent years, and especially in Mirage, Ryan began marshaling those aesthetic strategies into a new, more representational genre. Morphed terrains and constructions, like the hut-like oven depicted in Hideout, appear throughout the works, while a strangeness characteristic of science fiction suffuses Ryan’s atmospheres. The aesthetics of early video games inform Ryan’s approach to worldbuilding, one whose power is drawn as much from what is left out of a composition as what is included within it. This subtractive impulse also characterizes industrial sites like quarries and dirt tracks, sites where the earth is present, but has been manipulated, cut, or moved.
Throughout each composition, Ryan disorients viewers’ sense of space. Compositions will often appear geologic, captured from a bird’s eye view in some sections, and from straight-on in others. His worlds unfold as the viewer’s eye glides across them, as though the temporal experience of traveling through space were distilled into a singular picture plane.
Perspectival slippages issue from not only the paintings’ compositions, but also their materials. Ryan uses sands of varying coarseness and density throughout his works. Usually, these sands are painted over, so that – when viewed from afar – their differing textures fade seamlessly into one another. When viewed up close, finely ground sand imparts a hazy, velvety look to sections of the paintings, while other grains are large enough to protrude from the painting’s surface. In the latter scenario, the sand casts shadows on the canvas. At the same time, it is often the material used to depict mountainous formations that cast shadows within the painted landscapes. This double shadowing – the shadows produced by a viewer’s environmental conditions, and the shadows painted within the composition – charges Ryan’s paintings with subtle, gripping volatility.
Human agency in Mirage is represented not through the figure, but through the manipulated landscapes left in their wake. Like an archaeological site from the deep past or an image of a speculative future, Ryan presents viewers with spaces that have been tampered with, but leaves few indicators of what they were used for. As much as Ryan’s color schemes soothe, with their dusty earth and jewel tones, his depopulated, skewed landscapes disorient. They give the sense that our world is a mutable, transformative place, a place that might slip away as soon as it appears.
Jonathan Ryan was born in 1989 in Buffalo, NY. He received his BFA from Louisiana State University and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Ryan has exhibited across the US and Europe, including three solo shows at the Landing (Los Angeles, CA) and a solo show at Hesse Flatow (New York, NY) in 2023. He has also been in group exhibitions at Monti8 (Latina, Italy), Andrea Festa Fine Art (Rome, Italy), Gerhard Hofland (Amsterdam), Hesse Flatow East (Amagansett, NY), Ekru Project (Kansas City, MO), Good Mother (Los Angeles, CA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), The Brand Library (Glendale, CA), Field Projects (New York, NY), San Diego Art Institute (San Diego, CA), and the Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA). He has received fellowships and awards from Woodmere Museum of Art, Tyler School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, and LSU School of Art.
