Ryan Wallace, Installation view, Mark Moore Gallery
Image courtesy of the gallery, 2013

Ryan Wallace, Redactor is the artists first exhibition at the Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, California. On view in the project room, he was recently picked up as a gallery artist and his next exhibition will be in the main space. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Wallace is an artist who was trained in the traditional, figurative painting style and has since found a way to better communicate his own interests and artistic agenda through abstract form. Redactor, finds the artist as the title suggests, in a process of removal and obscuring. His multi-layered process delves into the technical, formal properties of abstract painting, and in the vain of the Abstract Expressionists, has limited reference to the human hand. The artist spends some of his time in the Hampton’s and in doing so is flooded with a wash of the abstractionists who came before. Jackson Pollack, de Kooning and the recently deceased John Chamberlain, all looked towards non-descript forms to establish a body of work and dialogue within a particular moment of art history. Wallace, as a contemporary artist and what could be considered as a part of the New Abstraction painters, delves into a methodology negating any form of narrative or representation. Rather, his is an obsession of compositional study, direction and happenstance.

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Ryan Wallace, Redactor, Installation view, Mark Moore Gallery, California, 2013

For the exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery, Wallace has work on view that is earthy, and almost beach-like in color reference and palette. Hearkening to informal seascapes and aerial views, everything that a viewer may find of interest and or familiar, is complete chance. Working on the floor and in a 360 degree angle, the artist is not afraid to step onto the canvas, smear, and remove any element of “preciousness” until the work is stretched and hung on the wall. Before that determined declaration of “finish” is arrived upon, dust and other ephemera can find their way onto the surface. Therefore, while less evidence of “hand” is visible, upon close inspection, one may be able to recognize a mark left by a foot, or the residual studio gunk balled up and transferred from the bottom of a shoe onto the canvas. This combined with a glittery medium, assist in making a multi-dimensional image that begs to be considered even if in a subtle, unassuming way.

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Ryan Wallace, Detail, Mixed media on canvas, Image courtesy of Mark Moore Gallery, 2013

Ryan Wallace, Redactor is on view at the Mark Moore Gallery until November 16th, 2013.

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