Robert Ryman (1930-2019) was a jazz musician and a security guard before he was an artist, so you can guess what his art is like: experimental and freeform, sure, but rigidly, obsessively observed too. This show of ultra-minimal drawings has all of that in spades.
He drew on anything he could find, but nothing here feels like scrap or trash, in his hands it all becomes serious and formal and thought-through. The show opens with coffee filters, framed as pristine, fragile, round canvases. They’re covered in subtly clashing lines. The guy loved grids, he thought they were ‘perfect’; they’re a device he uses over and over to create tension and to separate space. Here they gently misalign, squares nudge uncomfortably off the picture plane. In some, the formality of the grid is a space for a mess of white pastel. There's room for chaos, it just has to be contained.
Other works here are on aluminium and normal paper, but they’re messier and wilder. Grids contain scribbles and arrows, doodles and rubbings. Chunks have been sliced out of the paper, images are erased and redrawn. They’re somehow both frantic and placid, messy and precise, but all fascinating and gorgeous.
Everything here is about the possibilities of drawing, about how lines can meet and clash, how order can meet mess, logic can meet chaos. It’s like jazz, man. Very, very secure jazz.
