Randy Wray

 Wertenbroek / Wray

Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris, France, September 2 - 23, 2023

‍‍Lo Brutto Stahl is pleased to host Wertenbroek / Wray, the first edition of the gallery’s duo show series Dialogue, featuring the works of Manon Wertenbroek & Randy Wray.

Each form that Wray animates through paint is vexed. Each mark builds up a fossiled shrine of negations, a skin of paint that glows with dim color. Strafing between organic and inorganic associations, each figural move becomes stranded in zones of mysterious force. Wray engineers enigmatic burls of affects, shadowed pulses that unfurl vibrant energy that remain elusive shapes; impossible to reify, translate, or reduce. Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin materializes here as painting, where subtle shades of difference generate meaning through shared proximity and association. It is a dim sight, of things seen in shadow where pupils adjust to low light, and everything keeps the aura of metaphysics, of second-guessing, that grows undying instruments within us. Each form is distanced beyond reach, while still producing the feeling of being underneath the skin – animal architectures that pose themselves as caltrops, teeth, skulls, and femurs – carrion blooms, faint and distilled.

The figures of these current paintings stride along subterranean shores. They are effigied with the colors of forsythia and flame of the forest, emergent from deep greens and blues that whisper with cool spiritualism. They are shadows found in pond reflections, apparitions nesting within tree hollows and alcoves that hover above the water. Each open interpretation splits the distance between interior and exterior. Drift (2023) and Hymn (2023) operate as more conventional compositions, with epicenters that evoke figure and ground or stratified landscapes. In Cast (2023), there is the strange company kept between the pale fossil and the red moon shape to its right – a conversation between relics, that situates the infrathin dialectic between them. It is their inconclusive movements that keep each spectral shape orphaned from easy meaning. They are the hinge of the moment a dream shifts to nightmare, and drifts from one thing to another. Sinking down to them we feel a rhythm that matches a feeling in our bones, a chattering ritual of our teeth, a leaking eclipse of our sinew and the sinew of plants and forest floors as well. Soutine said that he wanted to show all of Paris in the carcass of an ox.

- Father Stele Karst