"Labyrinth" at Not Gallery

Texas Center Stripe by Ryan Thayer Davis

This new collection of paintings by Ryan Thayer Davis is a meditative study of layer and solitude. The works dominate the space with their size and highly saturated abstract fields of color. They are warm, alive, active, and pleasing to be among.

Davis, as alluded to by the show's title, tasks the viewer with a labyrinthine journey visually in his work and literally in the graffiti path on the pavement just outside the warehouse gallery. Each painting (a mix of oil and acrylic, all on canvas) is constructed in layers of individual compositions one on top of another, at once obscuring what is beneath, reacting to it, and allowing the beneath bits to show through in negative spaces.

In the near-thousand-word essay written to accompany the show – part artist statement, part personal statement, part geometric proof, well worth a second read – Davis notes that because a labyrinth is a unicursal design, "it is impossible to get lost, and there are no decisions to make, apart from simply walking onwards." Similarly: his composition of a piece. It is sincere, without intention to entrap or confuse.

Texas Center Stripe, positioned as the fulcrum of the collection most immediately viewable as you enter the gallery, epitomizes Davis' style. It is a large piece, 60 inches by 72 inches, with concentric waving yellow rectangles hypnotically disappearing into the center of the canvas. Upon closer inspection, the composition of the layers beneath the yellow appear as individual units: a pattern of light blue circles laid over a winding path of red, and further beneath that, fields of white. Effectively, the viewer consumes the piece as a whole then is drawn deeper into the canvas, following the thread of what's just below, until no further layer can be uncovered. As emerging from a labyrinth, the viewer pulls back the way they came to consider the whole again having seen things not apparent upon first approach.

Though contemplative and verbose in his statement, Davis is not guilty of taking himself too seriously, as can be seen in plenty of moments of levity. Boing Boing (the title alone: hilarious) suggests scenes straight out of Mario Bros., circa 1995. Bricked, a personal favorite, sports a dent in the left side as if the frame were dropped. A flaw that Davis shrugs off and makes work for him beautifully.

Each painting is a record of the real time Davis spent in his studio creating them in solitude. Their size and number and construction accounts for an astounding number of hours. And if the center of the labyrinth is the blank canvas below, then Davis is ever at the center constantly working additively outward to find the final surface – a man digging himself out of a hole. His final work briefly recreates this escape into solitude for the viewer, and then, as he puts it, "you return to the world with its confusion and contradiction. Space and time normalize and flatten out."

Go see it before you can't.

"Labyrinth: New Paintings by Ryan Thayer Davis"