Casey Kaplan
The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode | Nasher Sculpture Center
October 22, 2022 – January 15, 2023
Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Ronay is best known for his chromatic, handmade wood sculptures that at different turns suggest otherworldly landscapes with futuristic architectures and bodily processes like digestion and aging. For his exhibition in the Nasher’s Lower Level Gallery, Ronay expands the scale of his work to create his largest and most ambitious sculpture to-date.
Titled The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode, the nearly 24-foot-long sculpture offers a comprehensive introduction to Ronay’s surreal worlds and the various creatures inhabiting them. Representing that tension between abstraction and representation, the various connected elements in The Crack achieve what Ronay describes as “the razor’s edge of familiar and unfamiliar; you think you’re seeing something, but you’re not quite sure.”
Ronay’s process begins with drawing, his ideas for sculptures recorded in pencil in small notebooks or in charcoal on large format sheets of paper. He then culls through these drawings, piecing together different forms or ideas that comprise his singular, three-dimensional compositions. This relationship between two and three dimensions is evident in the front-to-back orientation of his sculptures, with the “front” determined by its position in the corresponding drawing. Both the scale and frontality of The Crack relate the sculpture to architecture, with its narrative elements recalling an ancient frieze. An amalgam of nearly three dozen drawings the artist made over the previous three years and containing a multitude of leitmotifs recontextualized and reimagined in new compositions, colors, and textures, Ronay’s The Crack represents a culmination of nearly a decade of thinking, making, and creating.
For more, visit the Nasher Sculpture Center website here.