Planatacia x Abstractica
Daniel Pasteiner and James Ryan
27th February – 28th March, 2009

Rod Barton and Standpoint are delighted to collaborate in presenting Planatacia x Abstractica, works by Daniel Pasteiner and James Ryan - two impressive young artists working on the boundaries of formalism and invention.

Manet’s painting Boy Blowing Bubbles (1867) can be taken as an allegory for the hopes and pitfalls of the abstract stream of the modernist project, and a thought-image for the show Planatacia X Abstractica. Manet made this painting five years after his harbinger of impressionism Music In The Tuileries, which hinted towards the collapsing of the illusionist/descriptive mode of painting towards the modernist surface/abstract mode where objects are broken up into first cubist space and then dispensed with altogether in a post-cubist ‘pure’ field. This movement from cubist space to pure abstract painting and its ‘repressed’ counterpoint - the Duchampian readymade, is implicit in the show’s geography - a semi-divided schizocynical brain-map of two ‘hemispheres’.

James Ryan’s abstract compositions populate the first ‘hemisphere’ in a traditional white walled format. Referencing the methodology of Joseph Albers – ‘extended possibilities through imposed limitations’, Ryan creates deceptively painterly optical explorations of modern architectural space. These paintings, through their serious investigations of supposedly defunct modernist tropes, hint enticingly at all that is repressed in them - the breakdown of historical continuity and rational space. Their interlocking and overlaid geometry suggest the push and pull of two against three dimensions; and the physical and emotional climate Ryan attributes to the built environment – a continual competition of weights and planes, a continual flux and degeneration.

James Ryan graduated RCA, MA Painting 2007. His solo show Parallax, was at the Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh in 2008. Group shows include Light Pollution at Rod Barton Invites, London and New Contemporaries, London, Manchester, Walsall, 2007.

In the esoteric mechanical-light assemblages of Daniel Pasteiner, which occupy the rear half of the gallery, this flux expands to threaten the rational. His backlit translucent collage/paintings and interlocking vegetable sculptures still retain elements of formal rigour, but conjure associations of DIY science-fiction film and arcane mysticism. Pasteiner uses the Duchampian approach to post-cubist space as a starting point for his investigations. In this ‘dark hemisphere’ (the gallery lights are off) the irrational expanding multiplicities of cynical/paranoid object-worlds start to become manifest. The viewer is invited to explore a Breugelesque landscape of systems/entities - analogous to a radiant return of the pre-modern primordial un-light.

Daniel Pasteiner graduated from the Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture in 2007. Last year he had two solo exhibitions; 'Twilight in the Anti-World' at Suzie Q Projects, Bob Van Orsouw, Zurich, and 'Paintings of Colour' at Rod Barton Invites, London.