HOUSTON, TX.- Blaffer Art Museum mounts the first major museum presentation for New York-based artist Matthew Ronay. Surveying a recent body of meticulously hand-crafted and vibrantly colored wooden sculptures, reliefs and installations, the exhibition continues through Oct. 1 at Blaffer Art Museum.
Created since 2012, the works on view invoke biological processes and psychological and mythological narratives while formally drawing on Surrealism, psychedelia, and science fiction. Their vivid palettes combine hues from across the spectrum that seem to vibrate and hum—an achievement all the more remarkable in light of Ronay’s deuteranomaly, a form of colorblindness caused by a shift in the green retinal receptors.
Ronay’s recent works deliver a phantasmagoric vision of physical and psychic processes fueled by science and psychoanalysis, art history and fiction. Made primarily with basswood, dye, and gouache but often incorporating such materials as steel, plastic and cotton thread, Ronay's sculptures, reliefs, and installations emerge from a generative practice of drawing. Inspired by a deep appreciation for botany, mycology, and biology—fields that explore parts of the physical world that are often hidden from humans' perception but shape our experiences in ways both subtle and profound—Ronay seeks to create "something that looks as if it's grown, that these aren't objects that were necessarily made by a human, but that they've grown themselves."
Ronay's early works were largely figurative sculptural tableaux constructed with industrially produced fiberboard (MDF) depicting distorted everyday objects or amalgamating body parts and domestic items whose cool, machine-produced aura belied their aggressive psychological charge. In 2007he began producing more totem-like sculptures in a restrictive palette of palette of blacks, whites, grays, and browns, culminating in Between the Worlds, an immersive installation first shown in 2010 at Artpace, San Antonio. In the intervening years his work has taken on an increasingly expansive scale, a sense of choreographed space, and the stunningly evocative palette that has become his trademark. Using an extensive set of dyed wood color "swatches," Ronay collaborates with his wife Bengü, a graphic designer, to realize the desired color temperature.
Along with a dozen discrete sculptures and reliefs, the exhibition features two large-scale installations made of groupings of individual sculptures. Organ Organelle (2014), which Ronay likens to a respiratory system, offers a carefully orchestrated arrangement of biomorphic shapes and structures in bright gradient shades of pinks, purples, yellows and the occasional touch of turquoise. Set against red fabric, each sculpture seemingly pulsates with heat and reproductive energy as if grown from a magmatic jungle that is home to exotic plants, fruits and flowers. With the interconnected fabric mats shaped to evoke biological cells or chemical flasks, each of these sculptures assumes a vital role in some form of organic circuit that flows through a portal-like shape mounted against the wall and framed with head-like ovoids, elongated staffs and open circles. With its wall-bound verticality and 90-degree remove, the configuration of portal, mask, staffs and circles introduces a ritualistic element that connects the botanical to a human scenario.
Another major installation, In and Out and In and Out, Again (2013) unfolds against the backdrop of a large wall-bound gouache of downward pointing phallic shapes in blues and turquoises whose flow is interrupted by a singular orange-yellow triangle at its lower center. From its narrow wooden base with green stems running across its expanse extends a blue latex carpet in the shape of an elongated oval upon which six sculptures are placed in linear succession like markers of a somber procession. Closest to it is a narrow elongated platform held up by breast-like shapes and vaginal mounds, upon which rests a creature that appears to be all organs, veins and arteries, its structure and coloration evocative of renderings of the human cardiovascular system with lungs, heart, kidneys, and liver and its circulation of oxygen poor and rich blood identified in red and blue.
Contemplated together, Organ Organelle and In and Out and In and Out, Again read like a diptych, complementary monuments to birth and death centered on the organic nature and functions of the body, whose vegetative inevitabilities are reinforced through a ritualistic presentation.
Matthew Ronay was born in 1976 in Louisville, Kentucky, and lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2000 and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1998. The artist has exhibited extensively at institutions worldwide, including Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London; Kunstverein Lingen Kunsthalle, Germany; Artpace, San Antonio; Serpentine Gallery, London; SculptureCenter, Long Island City; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and Locust Projects, Miami; among others. His work was included in the 2013 Lyon Biennial and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
