summarize: Heat and elbows, dreams and knees, light and shadow! All embrace. Decay gives birth to life, and laughter rings out across the crooked path. In The Long Livers in the World’s Hale, Ray Barsante’s canvases are at once elegiac and sardonic confrontations with transience. From landscapes to bodily interiors to psychic dimensions, this transience proceeds on both intimate and cosmic scales. Liver reds and browns of both organic and geologic bodies dance along substrates, where mummified ladybugs cling and branches of boiled cauliflower sprout. Shadow is interlaced with light. A group of ghostly, raggedy travelers descend down a path into a great hole in the earth, their movements shaped by and shaping eternity. Like a humility of polychaete worms, the figures cultivate a radical tedium, welcoming the labor of existence. Carefully constructed misalignments in the canvas-supports conflate the structure and surface of the painting with the skeleton and skin of the human body. The boundaries between painting and sculpture are likewise troubled.
Ambivalence marks the work with an archive of wandering dashes, blemishes, deep-fried images and bodily inferences in uneasy, chimerical versions of self-portraiture. Throughout the show, corporeality slips into non-objectivity where modular constructions are built from repeating self-similar parts. While finite on the wall, these interlocking parts theoretically repeat infinitely. Delicate, abject organic objects project from surfaces like indeterminate malignant growths. Embalmed and separated from their origins, they are difficult to name, while mysteriously memorialized. As the work entangles pictures with these mournful things, it also points to the history of still life, its theoretical underpinnings of bodily mortality and the eternal soul, and its object-based personal narratives.
An interior sun and moon hang tethered by an invisible electrical cord. Living and phantom insects fill the space with heavy atmosphere. The visionary artist William Blake produced an endless archive of illuminations– images for texts– including a series for Robert Blair’s brooding 18th century romantic poem The Grave. The poem, a densely layered, imagistic work, contemplates the physical reality of death, transmutation, and ideas of the afterlife. Barsante came across The Grave through a love of Blake, and grew absorbed by it, a confluence which manifests all through the show, its works and their titles. Barsante’s idea of illumination, departing from an explicitly narrative and representational one, opens up to multiple forms of abstraction, giving emphasis to affect, sense of time, scale, and bodily presence. Categories of abstraction and figuration, interior and exterior destabilize. Instability becomes a generative reflection on the self and the world in which it moves. Through material and formal hybridity, Barsante illuminates what remains elusive, obscured, and unknown.
