Frank Ryan's Lived Perspective at Track 16

Frank Ryan, Second Street Tunnel 1, 2013, oil on canvas, 72x132 in.

By LAWRENCE GIPE June 28, 2024

"You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real." Eduard Manet

L.A. painter Frank Ryan has achieved a remarkably balanced confluence of content, technique and scale in his mini-retrospective at Track 16 entitled “Lived Perspective”. Culled from 20 years of production, and featuring gigantic canvasses as well as intimate works on paper, this selection aptly captures this protean artist’s wide range of subject matter  - a corpus that is held together by Ryan’s poignant obsession with unspectacular scenes of everyday life.

The works are based in, and expand upon, the visual rhetoric of late-19^th century, pre-Modernist aesthetics. Ryan eschews the “designing” of paintings that characterizes much of what we see today. In a lineage firmly based in the flaneur-isms of Manet and Hopper, he depicts what he sees without feeling the need to puncture the picture plane or hedge the style with graphic devices. While he clearly uses photos as a reference in some cases (others appear strictly observational), one is never left with the sensation of anything but oil on canvas. Process-wise, the paintings start out messy and loose-limbed, and they stay that way to the finish; Ryan’s rich, lively surfaces never lose their sense of spontaneity as the image focuses and coalesces into the final layer.

Frank Ryan, Unmade bed (Lantern), 2009, oil on canvas, 48x36 in.

The figure, and its relationship to the environments Ryan choses to represent, shifts dramatically - from the view of a surveillance camera to a classically posed portrait. Only the implication of presence characterizes “Unmade Bed (Lantern)” (2009), where we experience the residue of human domesticity in the banal tangles of fabric and crumpled comforters. Another: the stunning, 11-foot long “Second Street Tunnel 1” (2013), contains two blurry, nearly dissolving silhouettes, anonymous smears that merely indicate life. Ryan captures this once-gleaming L.A. urban icon (it is currently covered floor to ceiling with graffiti) in fervid sweeps of black and white in an epic, yet ultimately anti-monumental gesture.

In the tour-de-force “Perfect Pitch 2” (2015-2016), Ryan transforms a filled auditorium of spectators into slouching zombies (interestingly, it is the only piece in the show with multiple figures); we (the gallery audience) are oriented into the perspective of the screen – they (the audience in the dark recesses of the room) stare through us into the unknown narrative unfolding. “Perfect Pitch 2” illustrates one of Ryan’s stated goals in his statement, to “[examine] the ownership of personal experience and the precarious relationship between the viewer and the image.”

Finally, it’s in the “The Violin Player (Portrait of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, Jr.)” (2013-2015), that Ryan fully channels his inner-Manet, locating that “single and universal” figure that one encounters only rarely in life. In an echo of the Impressionist pioneer’s provocative portraits of the gypsy musician Jean Lagrène (i.e. “The Old Musician” from 1862), Ryan commemorates Mr. Ayers and his craft, portraying him with power and dignity, capturing the subject with his eyes closed in concentration as he plays his violin.

During any given urban stroll, we have all walked briskly by the likes of Mr. Ayers. Like many of Frank Ryan’s images, they feel familiar, yet they are unworldly. It tempts one to dust off that old buzzword: “uncanny”. So many of these exceptional works are. On view through July 13, 2024.  WM