Brendan Ryan - 'Duckin' 'n' Divin''
The Top Floor, 10th March–3rd April 2010
Take the junk shop aesthetic of early Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg, filter this through the Art Brut sensibility of Antonio Tàpies (who, like Rauschenberg, often incorporated ‘non-art’ materials in his work), liberally sprinkle the resulting mix with ironic references to the mass media circus and the detritus of consumer society, and one might find oneself working in a style similar to that practised by Brendan Ryan. Fluid, agile and expressive, Ryan’s paintings embrace a notion of art as continually in-process rather than tending towards a finished product. In fact, Ryan has noted that the worn and weathered surfaces of the ‘skip liberated holy ply and rescued mdf,’ on which he paints, function as ‘working drawings’ signposting various directions his works may take. Ryan’s rapid-fire creative process comes through in the stream-of-conscious account he gives of his current CoCA show, Duckin n Divin: ‘duckin n divin... refers to 2009, the year of the oxen, of the swine flu and the miracle drug, queen tammy, of the global meltdown, recession, the collapse of the housing bubble, liquidation, redundancy, the death of freddiemac & fanny mae, turmoil...yeah right.’
Almost in passing, Ryan mentions a ‘wee side show... entitled the guiltz [which]... is a duel [sic] reference to the frames and the guilt of the convent boy.’ Gilding, it might be noted, is a way of making the commonplace seem precious, and thus provides a ready metaphor for the machinations of advertising, where surface gloss often conceals a dearth of real substance or value. The guilt of the convent boy, whilst relating to the concept of original sin, also may be regarded as an expression of the anxiety that emerges from awareness of human lacks and failings. In this regard, Ryan’s incorporation, in his paintings, of non-art junk and waste material constitutes an implicit rejection of the culture of materialism and its promise to fill the emptiness in our lives with ceaseless admonitions to buy and consume.