Ryan McGinness at Quint

Ryan McGinness made the shift from graphic designer to gallery artist without much retooling. His work appears on T-shirts, skateboards and soccer balls, in numerous books and in a steady schedule of solo and group exhibitions. Taking the instant legibility of mass-communication imagery as his starting point, McGinness doesn't go far, but he stretches wide. He creates his own complete ecology: taking in corporate logos, clip art and the like, turning out crisply crafted pictographic variants and feeding them back into the image stream, where they are applied to products, walls and pages, becoming icons in the public consciousness and perhaps eventually the public domain.

In his show at Quint, McGinness hung paintings dense with calligraphic flourishes and icons (all 2005) on walls layered with the same. Designs on the large circular panels were applied by silkscreen. Calculated tangles of foliate and linear patterns hug the edges of several of the paintings, thinning out toward the center. Tucked into the ornate webs are odd, random images in silhouette--a deer head, a gentleman bending to kiss the hand of a maiden whose hoop skirt morphs into the body of an octopus.

The baroque linear swirls and variably sized round icons on the wall were cut from adhesive vinyl in glimmering teal, mauve and purple. They have the uniform graphic clarity of corporate logos and informational signage--think of the skirted female and stark male marking the doors of public restrooms. It's tempting to refer to such imagery as universal, but the term feels too affirming and unifying for symbols that are so bluntly generic and banal. Where idiosyncrasy breaks through this ebullient but highly controlled surface, the work starts to intrigue--not in the icon of side-by-side paper clips, but in the antler-headed soccer player with enormous dangling testicles, or in the neat, five-petaled flower formed of hand grenades. There, McGinness uses the language of accessibility to mildly subversive effect, like Keith Haring, Lari Pittman or Kara Walker.

In Video Happiness/ North Star (2002), images akin to those flat pictographs are joined in a continuous, seamless video flow, moving to a synth beat. The piece starts with a field of pulsing dots. A finger pushes one of them, like a button, setting loose a craftily integrated parade of animals, plants, machinery, people, stars and butterflies, all in opaque white, light blue and olive green. The cycle comes to an end with the image of two men shaking hands on the screen of a cell phone, its buttons pulsing. McGinness squeezes a modicum of poetry from the bland vernacular he draws from, and his imagery gains some emotional texture from references to different time periods. Mostly, though, the work keeps the eye busy and amused so the mind doesn't realize what it's missing. In this, McGinness is utterly in tune with the moment. With any luck, the moment will pass.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group