Casey Kaplan
Matthew Ronay
Permeable Solid: Matthew Ronay’s Betrayals of and by the Body
June 10, 2019
by Wallace Ludel
Self-pollinating flowers. Throwing up on the F train. Dissecting a cadaver. Losing your virginity in the woods. Welcome to the boundless world of Matthew Ronay’s first solo show at Casey Kaplan. Though the body and its countless permeable barriers are conjured, all allusions to it are strictly implicit and manifest themselves through the sculptures’ organic, winding forms—their enmeshing of inner and outer, and their conflating of negative and positive spaces. While none of the work is the least bit figurative, it nevertheless invokes our fleshy, molecular selves. Think of the early biomorphic Surrealists like Yves Tanguy; think of Jean (Hans) Arp and Fernand Léger’s Objects in Space series (late 1920s and early 1930s); but also think of The Jetsons or the cross-section of a Jawbreaker. Despite their corporeal readings, the works couldn’t be more graceful or a finer celebration of material and craftsmanship.
At the gallery’s entrance, ten sculptures rest on a thirty-six-foot-long plinth—it’s like walking into a cocktail party that’s about to erupt into an orgy. Each work is genderless, hermaphroditic, and you could swear that they’re growing—as if, were you to see the show a week later, they’d be larger and would have spread through mitosis into further objects. The works, all 2018, are relatively small and relentlessly beautiful, with titles that range from overtly biological (Extended Phenotype), to strictly atmospheric (An Autumn), to somewhere in between (Ovulated Anaphora). The large majority of the work is made from basswood, a material Ronay has used since 2011; and they make clear an absolute mastery of and revelry in it. Which is to say, he makes the impossible look effortless.
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