Based on personal, exterior, desired and fictitious experiences, Ryan Wallace’s paintings and drawings create worlds of variously interpretable, often romantic narratives. The work acts autonomously and as a whole, suggesting each piece as a segment or selection lifted from a larger landscape or longer timeline. Moving from figuration to abstraction, the imagery and symbols reflect an interest in the dualities, fleetingness and half-lives of the beautiful and the remarkable, allowing for a greater possible narrative to exist outside of the information provided within the work.

Wallace uses large fields of color and adheres flat elements such as canvas and paper to give a topographical appearance to his surfaces. As if mimicking a strange sundown, his wide-open palette keeps the middle range between light greens, rich blues, yellow-red, ocher, lacquered red and violet purple, all wonderfully arranged with a security of touch to create his striking dynamic compositions. Like an inborn drawing that is invisible until it emerges in the transparency of the artistic, the artist places himself inside the discourse on mark-making. It is through this process of probing into drawing and color, and through recapitulation and meditation that we gain insight into where the artist is situated spatially, physically and intimately, both as a painter and as an individual.

Brooklyn-based artist Ryan Wallace was born in New York in 1977. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Art and Design (RISD), he has gained much notoriety for his seemingly narrative paintings that are loaded with symbolism and references to contemporary culture and experience. Wallace’s work has been featured in publications such as Artweek and Tokion magazines. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in NYC.