RAY BULL
Get Up With It
June 18th - July 17th, 2015
June 18th - July 17th, 2015
A Trialogue
P. Guston: There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits.
Louis CK: I went to this Polish meat place in New York. I went to the guy at the counter and asked if I could get a sandwich. He was like, “yes.” And he just made me a sandwich. That was it. He didn’t ask me what kind. He just made it.
P. Guston: That begs the question, where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage.
Louis CK: Yes, it's more fun to experience things when you don't know what's going to happen.
P. Guston: To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else...
Louis CK: Well, when I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.
P. Guston: We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.
Louis CK: Well I didn’t do it. I’m doing it. I’m trying it. I’m still trying it. Do you understand?
P. Guston: When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.
Louis CK: All right, we did it. We got through.
What we are looking at when we look at a Ray Bull? Ray Bull’s paintings speak to the impossibility of abstraction in painting. His compositions consistently straddle the line between representation and abstraction. Like magic, they unhinge our ability to settle on what the thing is. We are looking at an image of abstraction, a representation. Ray Bull’s works on canvas spring directly from a dedicated practice in drawing. With a strict adherence to a monochromatic palate, he showcases a style of mark making that seem less interested in expression and more interested in their own form. The paintings are a constant oscillation of expression into shape, shape into picture and picture into image.
Ray Bull (b. 1990) lives and works in New York. He graduated from Cooper Union in 2013.
For additional information, please contact Ana Cristea Gallery by phone at (212) 904-1100 or by email at info@anacristeagallery.com. The gallery is located at 521 West 26th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues and is open from Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 6pm.