Mark Ryden’s ‘Eye Am’ Puts Faith in Fantasy
The pop surrealist pioneer conjures up a fresh crop of mise-en-scènes at Perrotin Los Angeles
Summary
- American artist Mark Ryden, known for his leading the pop surrealist aesthetic, has lifted the veil on Eye Am at Perrotin Los Angeles
- On view through December 20, the exhibition features a mix of paintings and drawings that revel in intuition, curiosity and feeling
Whimsy, wondrous and delightfully absurd, Mark Ryden’s fantastical worlds offer up an escape from our own, from the confines of logic, from chronology and the pressures of corporate enclosure. The pop surrealist pioneer has built a career out of elusive, Victorian-inflected dreamscapes, and his new exhibition at Perrotin Los Angeles only takes us further down this rabbit hold.
There’s thinking and there’s feeling, and as Eye Am points out, one often comes at the expense of the other. As a result, this new suite of paintings and drawings were guided by an instinctive, intuitive hand: “I tried not to paint what I thought I should paint,” the artist explained. “I tried to make art only for myself.” A self-professed iconophile, Ryden puts full faith in the image, its ability to speak directly to the soul, bypassing verbal language almost entirely. “Painting, for me, begins where language ends. Words are linear – paintings are not,” he continued.
From a wide-eyed Bye-lo Baby, a Tibetan snow lion and a lacerated Christ serving up wine to a circle of young girls straight from his own body, Ryden’s compositions gesture toward something sacred, serving as a bridge from this world to the next, enmeshed with all the tensions that tremble in between. “What I’m really trying to paint is what can’t be said – the felt experience of something just beyond the edge of articulation,” Ryden wrote. “Not a thing to define, but something to feel.”
Running through December 20, Eye Am is now on view in Los Angeles.
Perrotin Los Angeles
5036 W Pico Blvd,
Los Angeles, CA 90019
