In his book, The Idea of Culture, critic Terry Eagleton reminds us that we exist between nature and culture, and that this condition is part of what makes life challenging as well as remarkable: “We are not so much splendid syntheses of nature and culture, materiality and meaning, as amphibious animals caught on the hop between angel and beast.” I am interested in how we process and interpret experience as we live in the interstices between physicality and the languages/ideologies/desires that construct our identities. The new paintings enlist an offbeat poetry of forms that merges selected imagery from nature--cross-cut views of trees, silhouettes of tree tops, the human body, insects--with that of culture. The latter imagery is derived from everyday commercial packaging--a vocabulary that signifies social construction and exchange. Relying on ambiguity and attention to negative space, the play of varied geometries from commercial packaging establishes eccentric visual structures that underlie and punctuate the compositions. Paralleling structuralist practices, rather than statements of “what things mean,” these paintings are meditations on the ambiguities of how we create meaning within the curious admixtures and blurrings of nature and culture.

Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan