There is a painting in this show that Dick began by looking at a photograph of the cave paintings in
In all these visions the task of man is explicitly made large.
Wood sculptures emerge from the animate spirit their original yoke or crotch or
bend or branching suggest. The modern is as primitively rooted as in ancient
times, Ranck suggests. Both terror and tenderness take turns. The myth of fear
is as real as the myth of courage. The suggestion in such work is that the real
is indeed mythic in its very nature, and not able to be broken down into
surface realisms, or the representation of banal exteriors.
There are test models for the Trojan Horse here and there,
reminding us of vehicles our cars attempt to duplicate, complete with splitting
wooden wheels, and a recalcitrant technology that nature undercuts. This is
like the god in the machine, a thing long ago laughed off as a theatre device,
but nowadays a more visible result of our courageous stories. Think Industry
foiled by Global Warming; the car foiled by rust; the body aging from time’s
use.
The work of Gauguin has to come up in looking at these, and
you realize that Gauguin was intuiting abstraction in his own way. Dick Ranck
paints with less distraction by an exotic region across the Pacific. His
wilderness is the woods of Vermont
and Maine , his abstraction the
sky and what the mind plays out of it, or on it.
In this you have both light and air, some exaggeration of
the Id’s wide wishes, the ego’s drive, the toys of children, and the embrace of
love.
The generation of tattoos and Red Hot Chili Peppers that
thrashed about to wild music during the Super bowl halftime show the evening of
the opening are all coincident with these deeper meditations about our wild
natures. If not civilization, then Liberty
must stem from and be ordered by these ungovernable spirits.
John Sevcik
John Sevcik
At Richard Rosenfeld
Gallery
Throughout February 2014
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