Sean Smuda writes about Ryan Fontaine’s “Object In Hair Room and Other Arrays”

In Object in Hair Room and Other Arrays there is the beautiful thing, the erotic thing, the perpetuate-the-jouissance (or beings) thing and it’s everywhere diffused. Half-lives and relatives revolve through materials and time. The Object is the largish painting of a white torso with scraped viscera against a base and wall of designer-y sperm, its own shadow and three series of test swaths in grey and white. Behind its neck ascends a sort of time card of a hand going towards a canted frame that matches the settled slanting of the gallery proper. As the object scatters and morphs into alternate scales and textures, it roots with its gallery: Hair and Nails.

Exhibition titles are materials biting their point of origin whose alphabet continues the Object’s growth. Next it, Brown Rustic Shape with Grated Post is Joy, Use and Aftermath done, sewered yet preserved in autumn haze spectrum. Overheard on a sidewalk: “No, the guitarist shreds cheese with the strings”. Black and white sperm defy and create attraction on (sic) polarized terrains called Good Packaging. After a protrusion, Three White Strips on a Field of Black cites the equals sign as possible double satisfaction. On the far wall Object #1 in Red, Blue and White on a Field of Gold reverses the initial torso’s orientation with invisible hand in dulcet Gibson strokes. Below and to the right, Shelving Unit and Object #1 On Blue, In Relief shift the firmament and again reverse the orientation like a flag a flappin’. Their construction razing zones a grody rebirth from such a burnt idea. Picture the treated concrete wall of a “Billionaire” overlaid with that of sea foam green: a future of perfectible hindsight in face of the scarce.

In the back, Eclipsed Hair Room a dark mirror replaces the beautiful object with you-know-who (Untitled(ElongatedBlack)). The Grated Port has reversed itself into a gazing outie chain pendant and Good Packaging has slid and engorged into a soft Yang nagelbett. A peacock feather punctuating this eclipse recalls the preening in other films, October and Scorpio Rising. However, time here is space: cosmic attraction/repulsion of like-to-like, making out the unknown.

Finally the basement: In Other Rooms, here be time’s monster: Shape #2 and #3, one big hair nail, coffin-size, replicating itself. Substance, swathing and the shadow of #3 cast from lights by #2 lead to a summit of chain links shooting upward, from which hangs a white screen. Calendar triangulates Shape’s time in its flat-framed dimensions and differentiations between the essence of Object and the characteristics of Shape begin again…