Press Release

Ricky Allman:

Index or Symptom?

 

Exhibition: March 1 – April 2, 2004.

Opening Reception: Friday, March 5, 6-8 p.m.

NEW YORK – Globe Institute Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Ricky Allman, opening March 5 th and continuing through April 2 nd , 2004. The exhibition—with its interrogative title Index or Symptom? —will feature sixteen recent paintings, oil on canvas. This is the artist's first solo exhibit in New York. Ricky Allman is based in Boston.

The paintings of Allman employ Abstract Expressionism to suggest lyrical instances of urban views as palimpsests—incomplete erasures. Partial grids in a number of these paintings are rendered organic. They dissolve within atmospheric fields of color. City Planning 3 , 48 by 36 inches, for example, presents a dense linear vocabulary that reveals horizontal and vertical axes as organic webs. Curves here constitute a grid that is primarily vestigial. The indexicality of slack lines is mostly obliterated by atmospheric fields of color. Emphatic factures are dispersed upon the uneven physicality of the painting's surface.

This arresting Tech Series alludes to the modernist legacy of the grid. Within these picture planes, however, the topographic idiom lends itself to a pictorial space that is in ways closer to Eva Hesse's sculptural vocabulary than the rectilinear rigor of Mondrian. After all, Hesse herself has commented: “The drawings could be called paintings legitimately, and a lot of my sculpture could be called paintings, and a lot of it could be called nothing—a thing or any object or any new word that you want to give it.”

In a statement regarding “technology vs. freedom” the artist states: “We have extracted from the earth our cities and machines, our homes and our entertainment, we have attempted to organize the earth in a way that makes sense to us. Have we improved? Is the earth any more organized than when all of the ore was back in the ground, when all the lumber was back in the trees?  … The irony of our hand-made machines altering the earth's natural organization is startling.”

Ricky Allman's paintings, within the framework of his text, are rendered metaphorical of natural and urban topographies that are in decay. In this sense they are symbolic of technological symptoms of urban architecture within densely woven cities, where pollution is a precondition of a city's raison d'etre. Yet on the level of the visual, they are articulated through a distinct tactile sensibility. It is this tactility that gives this series indexical and metonymic properties. Here Renaissance has been rendered Rococo, revealing a formal grace through linear pronouncements and their very demise. Isn't impurity one means of untangling the conundrum of design versus color?

For further information, please contact Raphy Sarkissian at T 212.349.4330 ext. 110, or visit: www.rickyallman.com.