By Juliet Stratchan
Send in the clowns,
don’t bother they’re here.
They’re here.
They’re all here.
The chaos is before us in an asylum of works. Peppermint Patty goes S&M; Red Skull and a Gustoned Big Hero 6 menace a peaky Golom everyman, or is that the artist with a wine? Meanwhile, what the hell happened to Ernie and Bert?!
Alex Ryrie confronts us with demons at his latest install in the VCA Artspace and they’ve been right in front of us all this time. Pulled from popular culture, literature and mythology, his characters mine our memory bank for fragments of cartoons distorting comfortable nostalgia. The effect is compelling and bewildering. Two paintings on opposing walls feature a cast of ominous characters, screaming, strangling, staring and leering, this is last drinks at the Star Wars Bar and the ugly lights have just come on. On adjacent walls, two smaller quieter works sit isolated, single figures staring into space discombobulated, eyes lop-sided.
These flat paintings are like windows and we can step back, seeking the refuge of the white walls. But we are not safe, from the corners emerge gargoyles, clown monsters with eyes vacant and mouths agape, they’re stuffed and spineless, zombie horror tropes….. This is your pillow and your laundry bag in metamorphosis. You might never sleep again. These cartoons are only for kids who like their nightmares straight up.
Ryrie paints in oils and they spill and swirl on the canvas with a brazen confidence. Colour is blocked and then blurred; cartoonish outlines melt with excess medium loosening the loaded brushstrokes and giving way to dissolution. Slippage in the medium and the content. Paint is applied sparingly, transparent over sketch lines with a scratchy dry brush and only thick and impasto in pertinent parts, the dollop of an eye white and a smear down the face of a decapitated head. Queasy greens and greys swirl, contrasted with jarring reds and harsh blue pops.
Hands, teeth and eyes are oversized, cartooning 1:0:1 and are devices to draw the eye to their oddness. This is cartooning which belies the popular notion of simplicity. Here, as the best cartoonist knows, a few expertly selected lines can have more impact than a lifelike render. Stylization is a formidable device. Just like the drawings of Hogarth, Ryrie’s tableaux showcase social and psychological disintegration but here there is no moralising judgement, the viewer is left to ponder in their own swamp. How does pop culture affect our psyche? What is politics and what is entertainment, who are the clowns? What if the horror is not fiction?
Alas poor Yorick and the rest of us too.
(Papa can you hear me ?) Gods laugh at the mortals then cry.
Discombobulation. Two men walk into a pub. One sees hope/laughs/and orders. The other sees
despair/cries/and orders. The light bulb lights up. The iPhone is blank/empty/the world is ‘off’
tonight. The nightmares. Oh the nightmares. Clink. Yabber. Confusion. The hand. The lightbulb.
Mother ? The doctor ? The ghost ? The drinker drinks and thinks...
Ryrie’s work is pure sensation wrought by paint.
It's all in the eyes. Mirror of the soul. This is the dark night of the soul for the Western world.
Shouty shouty men run/ruin the planet/bully/murder/scary men. Shouty screaming women try
to compete/show that they too can bully as good as men.
There’s the face of god/papa up there, grey, dyspeptic, red drippy nose, blurry eyes, baby
elephant pink ears, looking down at this chaos. Eyes concealed. Squinting. Threatening. Or
hiding ? Hiding in the corner. Hiding their weakness. The failed pitiable monster ? Hunchback of
Notre Dame ? Crying. For love ?. Huge. Distorted. But camouflaged. The gods watch mortals
and cry.
There’s the soul of man down there, collapsed in the corner like a midnight drunk who can’t find
his way home.
There’s a school marm in the little portrait, or is that Kamala looking sternly at Trump, the shouty
man in short sleeves holding the skull ?
And is that little portrait of the anguished face the centre of this (set of) work – is this Alex ?
Every portrait is really a self-portrait...
Philip Guston is a major influence: Guston pink (Cadmium Red + Titanium White), in the flesh,
the pink elephant ears of the stuffed faces; the racial element recalls Guston’s Klan/pointed
hats; everyday scenes – like the pub – distorted, we don’t know what is safe, what is good
anymore in this surreal world. Guston painted the off-colour world he saw under the
domesticity of his stable family life. His daughter says he would disappear into the studio, and
no-one was allowed to go in there. Cartoonish. Gauche. It’s Guston but more personal. I can see
Ryrie’s face in the pub scene. And the little portrait of the unknown boy/man.
Everything is just a little bit off-kilter, off-colour, tacky big blonde-haired woman in the pub,
nauseous muddy tertiary colours in the ‘soapbox’ painting; black skinned woman with pinned
blue eyes; the ghostly figure hovering in the backroom/brightly lit background of the pub scene.
The installation, combining giant stuffed puppet faces, and 4 paintings – faces, eyes, hands...
Cultural references to Lurch, Frankenstein, Grouch, Sesame Street - is immersive, 3-D,
surrounding and disorienting. (Would be good to have the whole room).
For Ryrie, serenity and calm (adulthood and maturity) are out of the question. They are the
wreckage, the remains of inspiration metamorphosed into damaged artifacts—a glimpse into
the artist’s mind. Ryrie has never been better, and he’s only just getting started.