Mattea Perrotta abstracts figures and Jonathan Ryan abstracts architecture; their juxtaposition at The Landing educes the two painters’ similar manners of distilling contemplative moods from their divergent subjects. Ryan’s buildings frequently assume anthropomorphic details in windows and roofs that look ocular; conversely, Perrotta’s figurative forms appear furniture-like: the face in Comfortable Silence (2018), for instance, could double as a sofa. Like Jean Arp’s cutouts or Salvador Dali’s melting countenance in The Persistence of Memory (1931), Perrotta’s flattened figures appear reclining in some sort of dreamlike suspended animation. Her solitary female nudes are so simplified that their human identity is denoted primarily by way of basic curves and peach-toned skin. If one observes closely, further indications of humanity can be discovered in closed eyelids and scars hidden among her expanses of thickly painted flesh. By mixing sand into his paint, Ryan also harnesses textural subtleties to emotive effect, giving his paintings’ surfaces an earthen texture connoting desert soil or aged stone walls. Like Perrotta’s figures, his barren buildings appear totemic for their essentiality and loneness. Shading gives his paintings the trompe l’oeil illusion of projecting starkly from walls. Devoid of people, Ryan’s stepped pyramids and longsome staircases such as To Monte Alban (2017, pictured above) and Lavender Steps (2018) appear deserted like the futuristic structures in the 1960 movie The Time Machine. Each of these painters nostalgically ruminates on the past while evoking, as did H.G. Wells, a desolate future with cultures abandoned and people misused.

The Landing
5118 W. Jefferson Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90016
Show runs through June 30