LONDON.- Laura Bartlett Gallery is presenting an exhibition of new work by American painter Ryan McLaughlin. This is the artist’s first show with the gallery.
Hung in the gallery are 11 paintings of varying sizes, at once familiar, their scale is based on ISO 2016 paper sizings, the standardised format of commercial advertisements and public announcement posters seen throughout our urban environment, from bus stops, train stations and airport terminals.
McLaughlin’s surfaces are built upon a specifically primed linen surface, with a layering of oil paint applied in a variety of techniques. The resulting painting has a physical specificity and aesthetic intensity, revealing an archaeology of mark-making in an expanse where once something may have previously existed, but in McLaughlin’s workings, something new, or the potential of something new is revealed. Imagery is dually asserted and obscured.
For example, in Air Poule, 2015 a hybridized version of the Air France logo, originally a winged horse with the tail of a fish, the horse has been replaced with the top half of a hen. More an animal of flight than a horse and perhaps better representative of an airline, yet due to its size and weight defunct to flying only a few meters off the ground.
Similarly, in Akbar al Baker, 2015, McLaughlin abbreviates and distorts the logo of Qatar Airways to ‘QA’, yet retains a colour scheme similar to the airline’s actual livery. The work is named after the formidable CEO of Qatar Airways, a leader in the new wave of refined, international travel currently being pioneered by Gulf carriers. In Etihad, 2015, McLaughlin has reversed the ‘E’ turning it into a crudely rendered number ‘3’ and painting it green. Moving away from aviation, but evidencing transit and migration in a different sense, in Demeter, 2015 McLaughlin takes the original logo of the German organic food standards authorising agency Demeter International, founded in 1928, and simply joins each letter in a painterly cursive typeface.
There is also an undercurrent of the absurd and incongruous displayed within these works. The painting Basler, 2015, a treatment of the well-known German fashion brand targeted at the mature woman, plays with the balance of the presentation. Additionally, the two Bullybong paintings, both 2015, depict bongs with Bully, the Bull mascot from the now-defunct TV series Bullseye, as their base.
It is in the fusion of these approaches that McLaughlin embraces the precariousness of the image.
Ryan McLaughlin was born in 1980 in Worcester, MA, USA. He lives and works between Germany and the United States. He graduated from B.F.A Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include Locus PM, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2015), Rasins, Laurel Gitlen, New York, United States (2013), Barbara I&II, Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin, Germany (2012-13), Bunsen, The Two Jonnys’, London, United Kingdom (2010), Nottle, Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin, Germany (2009); Recent group exhibitions include Morning and Evening Asylum, Off Vendome, Düsseldorf, DE; Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany (2014), The Made-up Shrimp Hardly Enlightens Some Double Kisses, Laurel Gitlen, New York, United States (2013), Based in Berlin, Atelierhaus Monbijoupark, Berlin, Germany (2011), Waking the Dead, Autocenter, Berlin, Germany (2010); When the Mood Strikes…;The Collection of Wilfried & Yannicke Cooreman-de Smedt, MDD Museum Dhondt- Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2009); I Was Lookin’ Back to See if You Were Lookin’ Back at Me to See Me Lookin’ Back, Loraini Alimantiri-gazonrouge, Remap 2, Athens, Greece.
