Ryan Sullivan

Ryan Sullivan pushes the legacy of abstraction to the point of negation. While at first sight the visceral movement in his large canvases seems to partake of a new expressionism, it speaks instead to the nature of images. Nature is an operative word when describing Sullivan's paintings, since they so often evoke aerial photographs of desert lands and canyons or, for the imaginative among us, views of some undiscovered planet.

While expressionism typically invokes aggressive gesture, Sullivan's works result from a delicate performance, an exercise ruled by balance and fragility. Pathos is substituted with controlled strength, patience, and equilibrium. Through a unique technique that requires long periods of time-reminiscent of the plodding movement of the earth's plates along fault lines-the artist pours acrylic paint, latex, and wax, which are slowly moved and modified as the artist experiments. These paintings don't merely dry-they wither. Their cracks, which manifest contrasts in density and the pull of gravity activated by the artist's movements, are what make these works beautiful; their beauty lies in their conflicted existence, at once monumental and fragile.

For this reason Sullivan's work might be compared with that of Italian artist Alberto Burri, who was born in Città di Castello and took up painting as a prisoner of war in 1944 in Texas. Burri's early works are like eviscerated landscapes whose gashes remind us of sutured skin. (He studied medicine and served as a surgeon during the war.) By contrast, Sullivan's work reminds us that New York is neither Texas nor Città di Castello, and the skin of his paintings know war only remotely. His palette reflects a kind of nature that is deeply artificial and definitively urban. The artist is quite sincere about this aspect of his work: Accompanying his 2012 debut solo exhibition at Maccarone in New York was an untitled publication (created in collaboration with An Art Service) that had neither text nor reproductions of the works on view. Instead, the book featured the artist's iPhone photographs of dirty corners of New York, where various liquids had been spilled and left untouched for enough time to become the artist's muses.

The artist belongs to a generation of painters working primarily in New York who refuse representation and figuration in order to focus on the painting as object. For these artists, the canvas is "merely" something with three dimensions made of wood, fabric, nails, and paint. Within this realm of surgical analysis, Sullivan's position is distinctive and unique, residing between Burri's iconic sacks, Lucio Fontana's cuts, and Steven Parrino's destroyed canvases.

Nicola Trezzi