The Wild West

The Wild West
Scott Anderson, William Bradley, David Ryan, Jeremy Thomas
February 1, 2017—March 12, 2017
Galerie Richard New York brings together for the first time Scott Anderson, William Bradley, David Ryan and Jeremy Thomas, artists living in New Mexico, California, and Nevada under the title ”The Wild West“, from February 1st to March 12th. They share a strong focus on color, vivid colors, a playful but meticulous process which engages various techniques with a taste for constant experimentation.

Scott ANDERSON
Scott Anderson’s recent paintings contain undetermined creatures into a flattened three abstracted dimensional space. His process begins with a snippet of memory or a vestigial image lingering in his mind. He works intuitively to excavate something new and transformative from the memory. This process leads to paintings reminiscent both of Post-Modern Abstraction, Mexican Painting and American Regionalism.

William BRADLEY
William Bradley brings together the apparent spontaneity and energy connected with Abstract Expressionism and the precision in details and in composition which is quite the opposite. First you think of them as instant paintings and you surprise yourself by spending time on perfect details. You discover different juxtapositions of time condensed in these unexpected paintings. He deliberately destroys the usual preconceived connection between the visual language and the processes involved and re-infuses conceptual strategy to painting.

David RYAN
David Ryan has established his reputation for his bas-reliefs composed of entangled layers of monochrome panels, forming complex three-dimension wall sculptures with refined and unusual arrangements of colors. Through many complex steps, Ryan uses mutiple techniques and materials such as overlapping PVC panels, backing with squin fibers, and stretching his paintings with a squeegee to flatten the work so that it appears closer to a painting than a sculpture.

Jeremy THOMAS
Jeremy Thomas visually, technically, and conceptually unifies dualities: steel carefully molded by air, a creative process that mixes planned processes and expectations of the general shapes with the unpredictability of results in the details and parts of the sculptures. To Jeremy Thomas, “working in material, it's a back-and-forth between the artists says this, the material says that". By injecting air into malleable steel that's heated to about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, he creates and develops a complete new vocabulary of spontaneous, organic, and sensual shapes that playfully mix in other three-dimensional abstract languages.

Finally the most important connection between these artists is that they deal with oxymorons, bringing together opposite visual languages, opposite techniques, opposite techniques versus visual languages. This new generation of artists indirectly pay homage to Shirley Kaneda, the first artist to really focus on the concept of visual oxymorons. By successfully creating harmonious artworks based on oxymorons, they might send us a positive poltical and sociological message about the sustainability to live together in harmony.