Ryan Sullivan

4 Jul-5 Aug 2023

PV 19 Jul 2023, 6-8pm

Overview

Book launch and in conversation with Ben Luke: Wednesday 19 July, 6-8pm

This Summer, the gallery launches a new in-depth catalogue of Ryan Sullivan’s Resin Paintings series that surveys the recent developments of Sullivan’s approach to painting, published by Apogee Graphics in collaboration with Sadie Coles HQ. To coincide with the book launch, Sullivan will display a group of recent works in the series at the Davies Street gallery in Mayfair.

With contributions from artist, Uri Aran; gallerist, Clarissa Dalrymple; writer, Travis Diehl; and artist Jacqueline Humphries, Ryan Sullivan: Resin Paintings offers insight into Sullivan’s thinking and affords us an understanding of the considerable processes involved in making the work. This dichotomy between thinking and making, between pure form and its affects, is a central aspect of Sullivan’s practice. Through interview, essay, and philosophical provocation, this publication contends with these issues with candid intimacy.

In the gallery, five resin paintings made between 2022 and 2023 are shown alongside three smaller watercolour and enamel works on paper from 2021. Presented this way, a loose chronology of the artist’s changing approach mirrors the sentiment of the publication. In the smaller works, we see the application of paint onto a material support, the resulting marks read as gestures imbibed with the artist’s intention. All meaning – as in all that is to be read – is captured within the frame of that pre-existing surface. By contrast, as much as Sullivan wishes to remain true to the discourses of painting, the very notion of frame, surface, and support is collapsed in the newer resin works. It is precisely in this collapsing, however, that we find the paintings revelling in the paradoxes of their own categorisation.  

The Resin Paintings are made flat on the floor using two-part liquid urethane, often infused with pigment. Poured onto a flat rubber tray in controlled bursts, the curing time of each batch, along with the quantities, colour choices, and pour lengths, determine the visual effect. Building quickly in layers, while conscientious of the material’s behaviour and the conditions of their handling, Sullivan facilitates collisions, bleeds, and reactions, uncertain of the outcome until the process is complete.

Traditional painting requires the building of layers from the canvas upwards, the final surface partially or completely concealing its foundational marks and material support. The resin paintings are a reversal of this process, where the first pour becomes the unchangeable surface. Additionally, as the resin sets, it is also manufacturing its own material support. The object is built from scratch to simultaneously reveal its own pictorial plane. There is no canvas, only paint petrified into existence. The work is a receipt of its own process of becoming. This is not abstract painting per se, but abstraction as a form of material realism.

Much has been said about the visual qualities of these surfaces. It is easy to be seduced by their depth, colour, and composition, which are by turn geological, interstellar, and microcosmic. They could be slices of marble, compressed through millennia, perhaps images of deep space, or weather phenomena on the surface of distant planets. They could be microscopic imagery of molecular miracles or catastrophes. But this surface reading is reductive and belies their importance as physical conundrums. While impossible to ignore the pull toward interpretation, they do not aim to depict anything other than themselves. The resin paintings wilfully make known such paradoxes and claim them as a productive space to encounter the work. The surface is as flat as glass, yet constructed with depth that is not illusionary but real. The works are a product of pure entropy, the ossified outcome of chaotic, unwieldy, chemical reactions; yet they have been ushered into existence with precision and control. They speak to the conventions of abstract painting but their painterly credentials are consequences of their manufacture as objects. We instinctively look for the artist’s hand, but we can only survey their incidents.

The resin paintings are neither abstract nor representational, they are material. Hard realism masquerading as illusion. Ontological certainty that opens a world of unstable mystification. In this sense, the resin paintings never present paradox as an obstacle to overcome but as a space of radical becoming. They never quite tell you what they are because they are processual and indeterminate by nature. The works do not seek to provide answers but rather illuminate diverse new questions and responses to assumptions of painting as a medium. The publication of this new monograph gives collective voice to the ineffable feelings that our own confrontation with the work engenders.

Artists