Whitewall daily

Mark Ryden, "The Piano Player" (#94), 2010, oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches, courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York.

Mark Ryden’s The Gay 90’s: Old Thyme Art Show opens tonight at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. Before the show opened, the artist took a few questions from Whitewall.

WHITEWALL: First, let's talk the title. What is it referencing and how did you come up with it?

MARK RYDEN: "The Gay 90's" refers to the 1890's era of barbershop quartets and bicycles built for two. Being born in 1963, I grew up in a time where I was surrounded by these heavily sentimentalized "Gay 90's" images. (It is interesting that while working on this show, I found that many younger people, while having heard of "The Roaring 20's", most had not heard of "The Gay 90's".) These images give me very strange feelings. On the one hand, they can make me queasy with their thick content of saccharine, but on the other hand I am fascinated by vintage objects, by nostalgia, memory, and death. I am interested in exploring the line between attraction to and repulsion from "Kitsch". I find the “Gay 90’s” to be a thematic genre that pushes sentimentality and Kitsch to it’s utmost limits and that is why I chose it as a theme for this exhibition.

WW: What role does kitsch and nostalgia play currently? What role does it play for you, personally?

MR: I find it a subject of great interest to question why, in the modern era, things like nostalgia, sentimentality, and beauty have been so disdained in the art world. Imagination, fantasy, and aesthetic pleasure are found to be too low to be in high art. Yet it is in the world of Kitsch that the universal archetypes of the collective consciousness live, in the valley of the soul, not on the mountaintops of conceptual elitism.

Mark Ryden, "The Grinder" (#95), 2010, oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches, courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York.

WW: Your work juxtaposes sweet, fairy tale-like figures with disturbing images of things like meat grinders. What are you hoping to get at with that juxtaposition?

MR: It is interesting how many people find images of meat so very disturbing yet they don’t find it disturbing when they chow down a burger from McDonalds. In our culture there seems to be a complete disconnect between meat as food and the body of the animal that the meat comes from. I suppose it is this contradiction that brings me to repeatedly return to meat in my art. The oblivious consumption of meat without thought of the living, breathing creature it comes from is perplexing.  It surprises many people to learn that I am actually not a vegetarian, I do eat meat.  I myself don’t think it is morally wrong to eat meat. What I do personally is to try to remain aware of what I am eating and where it came from. When I eat meat, I eat only organic  “free range”  meat in the hopes that the animal I am eating had a happy life. I am not trying to preach a moral stance on anything in my art, but I find that juxtaposition of imagery can create a kind of distance and then an ensuing heightening of awareness.

WW: The subjects of your paintings are often set against a dream-like landscape. Are any a result of your dreams?

MR: None of these paintings are the direct result of a specific dream, but it is indeed the essence of the dream world that I am trying to access in my art. The mysterious dream realm, which lies between the conscious and the unconscious, is where our souls connect to great creativity and imagination. It is the place where we connect to other worlds.

WW: Abe Lincoln, Jesus, and the Virgin and child pop up in some of your work in the show. Why did you want to deal with icons? What relations do the three have, if any, in your mind?

MR: My paintings do arouse questions like these, and it pleases me when the questions are asked, because I think it is important for art to raise questions. Answering these questions is another issue. To “explain” certain things about a painting would, to me, take something very important away from that painting. Everyone always has this idea that an image must “stand for” something else, that the “real” meaning needs to be described with words. Instead it is the image itself that is the meaning. I think it is more important for an image to maintain some mystery. I choose to work with figures that carry iconic power, but I like to leave the mystery undisturbed. I leave it to the viewer to interpret the images how they will.

Mark Ryden, Incarnation (#100), 2009, oil on panel, 72 x 48 inches, courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York.