BRYAN SPIER DOTS AND PITHY SEQUENCES
It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of Bryan Spier’s solo exhibition ‘Dots and Pithy Sequences’ at Ryan Renshaw Gallery.
‘Dots and Pithy Sequences’ is made up of meticulously constructed, mind-altering, illusionist type paintings. Spier describes his paintings as an “exchange between the visceral handmade object and its flickering electronic counterpart”. He seeks to question the validity of painting in a world saturated by the digital. In his working process, drawings of pixilated lines and marks are constructed via the computer and then back through Spire’s hand.
These paintings, based on computer-generated poles, use inverse kinematics to bend and flex. They seem to strain against the edge of the canvas. The edges fragment as they bend, giving a jagged appearance and mimicking an inherent flaw in digital imaging. The digital imagery borne by the computer is intangible and immaterial. It has no relationship to the outside world. By filtering this image back through his body Spier humanises these technological marks. The paintings become a part of a personal search for self and are an exploration of a related form of visual communication.
Our greatest fear of technology is that it will lead to a loss of the person, of the sensation of one’s own physicality, sensuality or significance. Spier’s work comments on this situation, but it is not cynical and it does not tell us how or what to think.
“The first line has no context, it is just a push - a dark manifestation of directional force. The second line mimics the first; a small shift in colour is the only assertion of individual identity. Again, and again, until a solid body of colour is formed. The lines travel as one, inexorably towards the edge of the canvas. Before they fall into oblivion a seismic event causes them to change direction. Their continuing journey around the picture plane is the artworks only shot at survival.”
- Bryan Spier
Spier’s work deploys typography and geometric abstraction resulting in intriguing works of art that invoke both the forceful aesthetics of Modernism and a childhood nostalgia for racing stripes, speed and danger. The visual stripes are a cue. They are a communicative device employed to trigger a calculated response, in the same way advertising imagery creates consumer desire.
REVIEW
by Sarah Werkmeister
Bryan Spier is making math rock cool again through the medium of painting. Not that math rock ever became that uncool, now it's just even more erratic and unpredictable - aka cool-er. Armed with a swagger of masking tape, brushes, colour, and a keen ear for psych and krautrock, Spier works with the impeccable precision of a lone swordsman, creating frightful geometric paintings in his exhibition Dots and Pithy Sequences.
It's not all about a well-worn geometrical abstraction, but rather a polite ‘f--k you' to the conceptualism of yesteryear that has now become IKEA to our eyes. Think a painted New York highline gone 2D and mad, think documentation of a phobophobes reality. Think Pink Floyd playing live on Wayne's World and then realise that it was just a dream. If Spier were a band, he'd be Melt Bananaor a less cynical Slint. If he were an artist he'd be nothing but himself, or a hologram refusing to shift for you; the only way an artist should be.