LOS ANGELES––Martha Raoli of the Miami Rail put it best in 2016 as to why Matthew Ronay is being including in today’s Cfile without working with our beloved medium:
He’s a woodworker whose handsy constructions recall the earthy muscle of California clay tradition; any superficial resemblances to the oozing bubbles of Kenneth Price and the drippy sheen of Ron Nagle’s little sculptures only pronounce the differences in materiality and production. This is wood worked by hand.
The Miami Rail
What’s interesting is that the Louisville-born, Brooklyn-based artist doesn’t begin his elaborate amalgamated works even considering his medium. Instead, he takes to a small notebook sketching free form, automatic drawings averting even his own will as to their outcome.
These are not drawings of sculptures, they are drawings that become sculptures, which is to say they are neither plans nor diagrams, but something more free form, more intuitive, unburdened by regard for the structural particulars of the sculptures they will come to describe.
Gallerie Perrotin
“Conjuring both folk art and surrealism,” as Blouin Art Info writes, Ronay’s “loyalty to drawing” informs his works even when those drawings purposely not take into consideration the innate attributes of sculpture. Moving from his drawing studio to his wood shop, he begins to task of deciphering his own marks.
Ronay works alone and on one sculpture at a time, carrying each piece from conception to completion before starting on the next. Translating each sculpture from drawing to object requires solving problems of balance, resolving impossible perspectives, interpreting texture and adding color.
Gallerie Perrotin
After their transmorphic journey from sketch to sculpture, Ronay’s works “work together in concert.” Not only do they commune with- and relate to each other from pedestal to pedestal, but the rich sculptural assemblages––bodily bits seemingly crammed together “intertwined bodies, of limbs and protuberances, cuticles, peduncles, carbuncles, calcifications, intersections of hard and soft matter, barnacles, burls, tumors, phantom limbs and vestigial appendages”––are each harmoniously balanced.
Explore Matthew Ronay’s installations at Gallerie Perrotin, Paris here.
Check out the artist’s exhibition at Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) here.
See more of that Ronay’s works at Marc Foxx here.
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