Gardens of Unearthly Delight?Rex Ray at Gallery 16

Rex Ray at Gallery 16

The new works of Rex Ray at the Gallery 16 continue to delight. A few pieces reminiscent of his earlier gardens of unearthly delight are included, but most of the work takes the strengths of that work in two seemingly different directions.

In the larger pieces, over 6' by 7,' his gardens continue to grow. Candy colors, neon pastels, the colors associated with the advent of psychedelia, contrast with strong jewel tones. The color is strong and varied, but complex and nuanced using ranges of related color. Shades of chartreuse, lime green, and aqua contrast with powder blue and harmonize with shades of red and burgundy and ivory, gold, and yellow. The subtle earth tones, browns, chocolate, sepia, mauves, and rusts remain in the smaller resin panels, but in the largest pieces have become brighter purer reds, yellows, oranges, purples. Never before seen plant and tree shapes, webs and strings of light suggest the mystery tableaus of Rousseau, his luxuriant leafy jungle scenes if Rousseau had never looked at a botany book and had lived in SF since 1967. (Yes, Rex Ray lives in San Francisco, but not since 1967.)

These gardens contain no obvious animals, no predators, no prey. Complex traceries, festoons of light, suggest the rays of the radiating sun, suggest ripples reflections and shimmers, webs and canopies, become mandalas, circular radiating heavens no longer as bound by gravity, less brown, designed more as though grown or generated in the air. Ruth Asawa like swelling shapes, a signature of late fifties and early sixties design, suggest growing seeds, pods, leaves, fruit within the controlled rhythmic patterned harmony.

His smaller pieces, the resin panels, keep the faux wood and veneer patterns present in his earlier work. Both contrasting shapes and colors are more minimal more stark than in the recent past. The roots of these pieces in twentieth century modernism and russian constructivism are apparent. These pieces simultaneously suggest the living inert of Arp and the bimorphic and the architectural of Moore while maintaining a lava lamp like fluidity. The color is strong and dark, simultaneously higher in contrast and more subdued than in his other recent work. Rounded ovoid squares and other biomorphic shapes suggest living beings persisting in complex challenging situations/environments. Alternatively, these shapes, neither round nor square, orchestrated and varied suggest the spots of the skin of some strange giraffe. Fewer, stronger, more isolated colors and more grey cream and white distinguish these works. The contrast color is often bright red assisted by black, but aqua, lavender, emerald, tangerine, and other bright colors are also used.

These pieces are complex assemblages using paper cutouts fabricated, printed and cut, for the purpose of being assembled. The less glossy larger pieces on linen more clearly reveal the process of creation than do the resin panels.

All of these pieces both the large and the smaller, those on linen and the resin panels, blend the mineral and the vegetable, the inorganic and the organic, and the earth and heaven. Even the modernist abstractions contain rounded ovoid squares, each shape suggesting a life, a being.

In all of these pieces the earth becomes heaven, the never born lives. the oneness of the universe is manifest and the viewer is invited to recognize the cosmic nature of reality, the harmony visible beneath the apparent disharmony/chaos.