Contributed by Sharon Butler / While nostalgia and the yearning it precipitates may be gripping the art world, Cordy Ryman’s gently dazzling painting installations, on view at Freight + Volume, are unapologetically about the here and now – that is, what’s happening in one place, today. Titled “Monkey Mind Symphony,” the show captures the distractions we encounter day by day, minute by minute. What could be more apt for our time than a visual language comprising more than a hundred small, curious objects? Logically, they are the physical manifestations of tweets or threads, crafted easily, sometimes beguilingly unfinished in the traditional sense of the word, and arranged so as to radiate Ryman’s idiosyncratic energy.
For Ryman, the studio is where the hovering anxieties of daily life – personal challenges, political instability, looming disaster – are suspended. He constructs each small piece casually, engaged in a relaxed process of making. I imagine him grabbing a piece of wood, painting it, responding to what he’s just done, and then moving on to the next thing. Later, he returns to the stack of new pieces with fresh eyes and makes a few more moves. The openness of beginnings, rather than the claustrophobic tidiness of traditional resolution, is what captures Ryman’s interest. He’s a maestro of the quotidian and the contingent. The pieces will all come together in the curating and installation process. Or not.
In reading the December issue of ArtForum, I happened upon the Japanese concept of ma – negative space, breaks, pauses, and emptiness. Critic Catherine Taft, in a review of Yasuo Kuroda’s photographs, wrote that the photographer utilized ma as a compositional element, attuned to the measured pauses and spaces in between actions of the avant-garde performances he was documenting. Ryman’s work strikes me as the virtuous opposite of ma. It’s acutely about the activity that takes place in the process of living – the joy of making and the visual connections discovered. Not ma but more. Start with a circle and you may end up with the Twilight Zone spiral. Or the moon. Or a Kenneth Noland target. In Ryman’s singularly playful yet discreetly disciplined work, you feel both the confident dynamism and the cool reassurance needed to keep going. You’ll be surprised where you end up.
“Cordy Ryman: Monkey Mind Symphony,” Freight + Volume, 39 Lispenard Street, New York, NY. Through January 20, 2024.
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.
If you consider the meaning of “ma” in Chinese, it holds many diverse meanings (for example “horse”, “mother”; “hemp” etc), depending on tonal inflection. Maybe that’s the kind of “ma” Cordy Ryman can whip up- one that originates in some rudimentary understanding and then lands on something much farther afield.
I like Natasha Sweeten’s reference. Works for me! Thanks Natasha. And thanks Sharon and Cordy Ryman.
V thoughtful writing on a very inventive artist. Thank you!
Ryman’s paintings are puzzles, they are seemingly trivial which excite me.