Jonathan Ryan at the Landing

On View through November 2nd.

Artist Jonathan Ryan has been busy. All 20 works in his solo show at the Landing gallery (save one) were made in 2019. As such, the paintings, made using oil paint and sand, feel like a tight and intimate group, all picking away at a similar concern. Despite their strong sense of  grounding architecture (like an aerial view of Mexico’s ancient Teotihuacán), the off-kilter way shadows fall across his geometric shapes lands the work in the realm of the imagined. Childhood sand crafts these are not: through the meticulous layering of paint and sand, the works maintain a dry tactility without sacrificing a refined play with shadows and color.  Particularly interesting are two newer works, Green Door and Curtain II that upend the vantage point; in most of Ryan’s output, the viewer looks down on his formations, but here the perspective shifts, and the geometry becomes something larger than us, looming above.