CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/25/2018

Ryan McGinness: #metadata is new from Damiani!

"Don't Stress the Machine" (in studio, 2017) is reproduced from Ryan McGinness: #metadata, published by Damiani. "McGinness' Pictures in Pictures offer a kind of studio view with the maelstrom at its center," Carlo McCormick writes, "carefully framed by the quotidian elements of wood flooring or the buckets upon which a painting might rest as post-modern tromp l'oeil situational landscape—but these effects are about as comforting as being able to see the narrow ledge you're standing on after you've climbed out the window of a very tall building. Knowing there is something solid under your feet does little to ameliorate the unfathomable spectacle of what lies beyond. Nietzsche parsed the human condition as preferring 'the void as a purpose than the void of purpose,' and even if McGinness has an abiding optimism that is far from the nihilism of Nietzsche, his art has an uncanny way of playing right along that thin line of intentionality where meaning and oblivion clutch close to one another in a mortal dance. He allows us the judicious cogency of less is more, but he also raises that storm of superfluity that wracks and ruins the architecture of signification into the traumatic rubble of desperate loss. It's as if he uses the building blocks of visual language to build a Tower of Babel befitting the contemporary polyglot of culture's wanton referencing, assembling it all to an unfeasible height for the glorious purpose of watching it implode."