SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jack Fischer Gallery brings the work of Patricia Lagarde, photographer, book artist, and conceptualist. Her work is being shown together with Byron Ryono, sculptor and avid birder, in an exhibit called forma pura/ pure form.

In this show the gallery attempts to present two philosophies that deal with an ancient, anxious melancholy that explores the unattainability of the moon and its relationship to earth. Together we are given glimpses of the skies and the earthly firmament.

Lagarde’s photographs offer us a front row seat to the sky and all its poetry. The moon series becomes an actual tone poem and ode to a wonderful and hopeless attempt to trap the light. Isn’t that what photographs actually do? She attempts to capture this evanescence of the moon with the lightest thinnest possible scrim, making that nightly event even more fugitive.

Patricia Lagarde lives and works in Mexico City. She has a deep and abiding interest in early photography processes, such as using glass ambrotypes to print via piezography. This is a printing technique that uses 7 different levels of gray ink versus the typical printing that will use only 3 grades.

In stark contrast, Ryono’s sculptures are firmly planted in the solidity of the sculpture canon, as well as in the fire and earth from which they appear to spring from. The forms are monumental, and it is easy to imagine them towering above us in an ancient plaza. The work rings modern, yet there is a rawness that evokes a deeply-resonant primitivism.

Ryono states that he is deeply “inspired by a Gee’s Bend quilt and a high regard for Chillida’s work, coupled with the haunt of the samurai chonmage”. I am fascinated by the contrasting images of the feminine quilt and the masculinity of Chillida’s sculptures, coupled with the topknot of the samurai.