Summary<\/p>\n
American artist Mark Ryden, known for his leading the pop surrealist aesthetic, has lifted the veil on Eye Am at Perrotin Los Angeles
\nOn view through December 20, the exhibition features a mix of paintings and drawings that revel in intuition, curiosity and feeling<\/p>\n
Whimsy, wondrous and delightfully absurd, Mark Ryden<\/a>\u2019s fantastical worlds offer up an escape from our own, from the confines of logic, from chronology and the pressures of corporate enclosure. The pop surrealist pioneer has built a career out of elusive, Victorian-inflected dreamscapes, and his new exhibition at Perrotin<\/a> Los Angeles only takes us further down this rabbit hold.<\/p>\n There\u2019s thinking and there\u2019s feeling, and as Eye Am points out, one often comes at the expense of the other. As a result, this new suite of paintings and drawings were guided by an instinctive, intuitive hand: \u201cI tried not to paint what I thought I should paint,\u201d the artist explained. \u201cI tried to make art only for myself.\u201d A self-professed iconophile, Ryden puts full faith in the image, its ability to speak directly to the soul, bypassing verbal language almost entirely. \u201cPainting, for me, begins where language ends. Words are linear \u2013 paintings are not,\u201d he continued.\n<\/p>\n From a wide-eyed Bye-lo Baby, a Tibetan snow lion and a lacerated Christ serving up wine to a circle of young girls straight from his own body, Ryden\u2019s compositions gesture toward something sacred, serving as a bridge from this world to the next, enmeshed with all the tensions that tremble in between. \u201cWhat I\u2019m really trying to paint is what can\u2019t be said \u2013 the felt experience of something just beyond the edge of articulation,\u201d Ryden wrote. \u201cNot a thing to define, but something to feel.\u201d\n<\/p>\n