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the Landing is pleased to present Ether Or, an exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Ryan Fenchel. The gallery’s third solo presentation with the artist, Ether Or features new oils on canvas that develop Fenchel’s approach to alchemy and mysticism as transfigured through his medium. The exhibition will run from March 11th to April 22nd, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 11th, from 6 - 8pm.

The exhibition’s title puns on the word “ether,” a substance that was understood in the Middle Ages to permeate all space on Earth, and that is used today to refer to the highest point in the sky. We say objects “vanish into the ether,” imbuing the term with a mystical, surreptitious force. Fenchel’s addition of “or” doubles down on the term’s enigma. The paintings comprising the exhibition follow suit, testifying to one of the prime features of Fenchel’s practice: esoterica accented by humor.

“My paintings work with the false guise of still life,” Fenchel explains. “The longer you look at the paintings, the more the visuals explode.” Corpulent vessels, disembodied smiles, abstract geometries, gauzy atmospheres, deconstructed flower arrangements, and inscrutable faces appear throughout the paintings in Ether Or with levity and profundity in equal measure. Each form within Fenchel’s paintings has a distinctive character because of the artist’s newly expansive material repertoire, including thin washes of paint, waxy applications of oil stick, intricate oil painting with brushes, and faded, sanded down images. Undergirding these representational elements is Fenchel’s attention to the fundamental qualities of painting: shape, color, negative space, and the repetition of forms.

Fenchel’s compositions experiment with scale, space, and dimensionality. A tension between the macroscopic and the microscopic animates his images. In some works, amoebas swell to large proportions, as though viewed under a microscope. In other works, Fenchel represents structuring forces like time or the interrelation of galactic bodies. In The Easy Water Abacus, a series of twelve patterned, ovular shapes form a ring floating above a red vessel. The forms suggest not only abstracted florals, but also the number of hours in a day or an elliptical gravitational pull. Moreover, Fenchel distorts representational modes within paintings, often collapsing the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional within one image. In Invisible Elements (Two Timelines), for example, the top of the vessel is rendered with a quasi-cubist two-dimensionality that recalls the perspectival experimentations of Betty Woodman.

Since 2012, Fenchel has worked with the vessel as a formal and conceptual motif. Before Ether Or, these vessels were more systematically anthropomorphized (as the figure of “the adept,” for instance), while the new paintings embrace indeterminacy. In On the Return (Paracelsus At Dawn), a vessel resembling a front-facing body with two arms and crossed legs supports a white oval at its top. Faint applications of blue, orange, and yellow roughly sketch out facial features, as though its expression were disappearing before us. Meanwhile, circular forms recalling flower petals adorn the vessel’s body. The resulting image eschews categorization as either still life or portrait. Instead, it represents transformation as such, the fundamental quality of all creative expression and, ultimately, of all life.

Biography

Ryan Fenchel has had solo shows in Chicago at Carrie Secrist Gallery and in Kansas City at Haw Contemporary, in addition to two prior solo shows in Los Angeles at the Landing Gallery. His work has been included in group exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, Atlanta and Philadelphia. He holds an MFA in Art Theory & Practice from Northwestern University and a BFA in printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute. He's currently based in Los Angeles.