The Brooklyn Rail

Like his previous show, Constellations, at Freight + Volume in 2021, Cordy Ryman’s Monkey Mind Symphony features variegated matrixes of humbly painted receptacles. These assemblages, which use triangular and rectangular wood strips, are proportioned with ample empty space, sprawling the expanse of an entire gallery wall. Unlike the previous exhibition, however, Ryman’s new show also presents an array of self-standing boxes. These acrylic-on-wood boxes are no less self-effacing than Ryman’s assemblages and, in their own modest way, similarly play with spatial incongruity. Specifically, Ryman’s boxes employ rough-hewn edges, askew proportions, gaps in their linework, and incomplete painterly finishes. One first looks at Ryman’s boxes with the perceptual bias of eyes trained on Minimalism’s opaque contours and austere sheen, expecting a logic of continuity. We expect that the boxes be uniform, if not in their painted finish and content, then at least in their sizing, proportion, or hanging. Ryman denies his audience any such accord. For instance, Northern Curves (2023) has ever-so-slightly smaller dimensions than its neighbor, 664 White Grain (2023) and the number of painted faces on Pencil Thumb Drop (2023) differs from those painted on its neighbour, 99 Black Grain Box (2023). One can intuit that something ineffable—though related to the “causalist” lexicon of throbby, sketchy linework and “provincial” unfinishedness—keeps these works woven into a united whole, but can better be gestured toward than sententially captured.

Ingloriously filled and dissonant in linework, Yellow Juice Box 13 (2023) features uneven strips of paint: rich gold, daffodil yellow, apricot orange, chestnut brown, and tan slivers ultimately met by a chalky white corner. The unpainted lower-left expanse allows for the wood’s capillary grain to thread our perception once the box is viewed up close. These raw surfaces are the meager but recurrent motif in the show, noticeable especially in Automatic 130 (2023), a mosaic-like assemblage of rectangles arranged and hung around a corner where two gallery walls meet. From afar, there seems to be a general shape to the assembly, the amber-brown and unpainted lower left corner slowly overtaken by a motley of checkered patchwork. Upon close viewing, however, the outwardly invariant rectangle slabs of wood reveal significant portions of aberration, ranging from outlines of half-finished triangles to rivulets of sun-yellow and white.

These inconsistencies also relate to the minute wooden protrusions and jagged vertical stripes on boxes like Vertical Bubble Line (2023). On the face of the square, Ryman’s wobbly line bisects a white-painted surface, alluding to Barnett Newman’s oblique “zips.” One of Ryman’s great feats in this show is in his command in detailing dissonance: observed closely, the front-facing visage of 99 Black Grain Box teems with coal-hued spirals, each of a different measure, the negative space its own askew form. Ryman’s composition reveals additional disharmony. There is no uniform spacing between the boxes and no orderly shape behind their arrangement; they neither burgeon from small-to-large nor take the form of a heaving parabola. A good deal has been said about the “revisability” of Ryman’s arrangements, though curating with a spatial logic at hand would undo much of the discordance that makes his groupings (all of which are self-curated) so effective. Syntheses of supposedly dichotomous categories—e.g., figuration and abstraction, sculpture and painting—are ultimately of secondary import to Ryman’s spatial plying.

The artist is also heir to a tradition that has hitherto gone largely unnoticed: the box-based artist, a veritable modernist tradition, counting Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, William Beckman, Wayne Nowack, Rosamond Berg, Arman, Robert S. Neuman, Dan Basen, and Philip Wofford among its ranks. Many of these artists, particularly the Americans, made use of a proto-mannerist style, errant lines, found objects, that eschewed narrative. The tradition was once buttressed by the legendary Allan Stone Gallery in New York, where box-based exhibitions were in vogue from 1960 until the early 1990s. Granted, almost all of these artists used the box as a receptacle in which to delineate a world unto its own, enclosing gleaned objects along fantastical frontiers. One exception was the lesser-known Dan Basen (1939-1970) who, during his short life, created box-based assemblages that, like Ryman’s, were made from modestly painted parcels of wood of varied thickness, dimensions, and angles.

Although they are the most visually pleasing boxes to look at, Ryman's constructions featuring uniform smaller blocks arranged in stacked rows and columns are his weakest works. Accent Cloud Constellation (2023) and Automatic 130 make use of a few of these grid-like boxes, which admit too much congruity, reminiscent of three-dimensional Mondrian paintings. Luckily, unlike Ryman’s previous exhibitions, this show features few such pieces and where they are used, they are part of larger mixed assemblages.

Much has been written about the "New Casualists" like Ryman, Kadar Brock, Rebecca Morris and Jasmine Justice, who critic Sharon L. Butler characterizes as less invested in culling a novel visual lexicon than prodding the edges of failure and modest visual intrigue. But this show demonstrates that although Ryman’s “causalist” rhetoric rebuffs the notion of a motif, it heralds a language. Spatial idiom tethers his blocks and boxes together. By grouping disconnected and disengaged compositional elements, Ryman has figured one of his most unified and effective exhibitions yet.