Randy Wray: Particulars

MAMOTH is thrilled to present Particulars, American artist Randy Wray’s inaugural solo show at the gallery and his first in the UK to date. 

 

 

Randy Wray’s paintings resist any circumscribing definitions. While they reveal an attraction to natural forms, and wander through an expanse of gesture that charts its path through biological, ecological, and archaeological memories, they always step back from the edge of interpretation; delaying our ability to understand them right as they get to the border. At times they appear like glowing fossils, unfamiliar but tinged with gothic undertones, and echo something plangent; particularly when Wray seems to be citing radiographical shapes and MRI scans. But importantly, the shapes he creates have a slow rhythm, a speed encoded in the brushwork, that makes them undulate and pulsate with life. Each shape keeps its boundary, its membrane, while keeping the spaces between them active with the possibility of transmission. It is Wray’s series of about-turns, his decision-making process of not-this, that creates blooms of energy from their enchanting none-of-the-above. 

 

Each negation of our recognition and perception still feels realised - reverberating back to us something specific. Their ability to inhabit something more than pure abstraction, an undisclosed specific, is sustained by their index to cross-sections. Each form and shape that Wray develops seems vivisected – exposing their inner tree rings or carnal chambers. Take Host as an example. The milky bone-like totem feels halved, ready to be objectively studied and understood like a schematic rendering. If there is an aboutness to Wray’s process of painting, it may be in the link his paintings suggest between the role of the scientific observer to nature and the painter to their abstractions – the rational motivation to analyse and relate ourselves to the world by opening each thing up to see its mechanism. It is a link that also implicates the viewer. As we observe with the intent of finding meaning, of finding the ability to describe and categorise what we are looking at, the forms of the artist's paintings remain elusive, changing each time we percieve them.

 

Wray’s visual language of interiors, of insides, of the internal material schemas of these abstract shapes marks an important forensic re-commitment to them. This believability and commitment to pictorial apparitions, the need to treat them as real, seems to owe itself to Wray’s deeply investigative sculptural practice that has run parallel to his paintings over the years. The cross-section, the core sample, is also a motif within his sculptures, which seem to grow within an uncanny ecology of their own. In both facets of his practice, the artist establishes a loop of imagining between the metaphysical and the physical, adjacent to some of the moves of Susan Rothenberg. There is a familiarity in their abilities to shift the ground of representation and material invention underneath us. It is a shared look back, a return, that is crucial to providing an animism to the painterly language. this further absolves it from being perceived as purely esoteric.

 

The boundaries between the visible world and metaphysical abstraction are also engaged through Wray's use of colour. On first glance, temperature seems to guide Wray's choices in hue. The artist's palette traverses through sulphuric yellows and candescent vermilions, forming dialecticsa and contrast between churning heat and ghastly shadows. However, Wray's choices in colour are also chosen to cultivate an other-worldly light, a glow without origin or direction; a series of auratic effects of glowing after-images emerging from murky brines that seem directly spectral. Within this valence, we may be perceiving phantom bodies, a form of spectrality aimed at achieving tathata[U1] , a suchness of things. Perhaps the distance that we feel as the viewer from fully knowing what we are looking at comes from the sense that these reconfigured and de-personified pelvic crescents are detached from the physical world we occupy. Returned to us as ritual objects and now unfamiliar to us as disembodied apparatus, they so closely mimic the structures under our skin that we’ve never known a day without.

 

There are rhythms to Wray’s source material that offer clues, along with their titles. Tether (2021) and Shade (2022) both utilise similar shapes and occupy the same territory of the colour wheel; but where they diverge is telling. Outside of Peacock (2021), which seems to depict the gills of a mushroom, Tether and Shade employ some of the most directly recognisable imagery of Wray's paintings, offering us a potential source code to his inventive shape manipulation. In Tether, Wray centres the shape, creating a more conventional relationship between form and space that produces it as a kind of symbol. Wray’s greatest abilities are displayed in full force, specifically the depths and hues and subtleties he is able to conjure in the darkest shadows of the surface. In Shade, Wray has incorporated similar shapes and shadows, but has painted a hardwood floor at the bottom of the painting, vanishing back in one point perspective. Wray sets up a stark foreground and background relationship, familiar to that of Francis Bacon, that makes the floating joints the most direct suggestion of metaphysical elements in the exhibition. Organs, bones or figs float above, haunting the atmosphere of the domestic interior. Yet again, Wray’s shapes vibrate between what could be brain matter, pelvic bone, pagan artifact or fetish object, like a pierced bull’s heart. The artist leaves us still guessing at animal, human or mineral; physical or metaphysical; reminders of the real or castings of the spectral; and the blurred significance of distinction between each.

 

While forming delays in graspable meaning, they also form connections to Wols and early tachisme, while extending into graphic color through their seductive facture and memory-like surfaces. Flickers of the dense surfaces of Odilon Redon or Albert Pinkham Ryder find themselves tethered to the formal and psychic explorations of Graham Sutherland. It is Wray’s shadows that do the heavy lifting, the shapes that feel like they’ve never known light, that allow for the vibrant charges of Cadmium Orange or Bismuth Yellow to glow and burn like sulphur in ways that haunt us. They sear their way into our mind’s eye to store themselves in the same places that we keep sunsets, flashes of intense colour and light, and awe.