SNAP | society of northern alberta print-artists

review from Edmonton Journal, click here for PDF

review from VUE WEEKLY, October

Does Daryl Rydman’s Ledger add up?
Printmaker works in four dimensions where most work in three

Daryl Rydman is a collector of images. Postcards, snapshots, illustrations, diagrams—he archives all manner of visual information which subsequently finds its way into his work. In Ledger, Rydman presents a series of images produced in his signature style, which involves printing an image onto successive layers of acrylic gel.
Rydman’s process produces images with an unusual degree visual depth—and I mean that term literally. Rydman borrows the four-colour separation process used in commercial print production which breaks down the colour images that he works with into their primary colour components of red, yellow and blue. In the ordinary commercial process, each layer of colour is printed in succession to produce a full-colour image—yellow indiscernibly mingles with various gradations of blue to form green, red mixes with yellow to create orange and so on, in a manner that conceals the mechanical process of the image’s production.

But Rydman, rather than trying to conceal the foibles and flaws of this production method, instead makes transparent images, building up the successive colour-separated layers into a hard, thick surface of transparent acrylic gel. The image isn’t painted on a canvas or printed on paper; it’s an image-object, and therefore its own kind of “thing,” possessing a three-dimensional quality we don’t ordinarily think about when we look at a picture. With their doubled, blurry, out-of-focus outlines, these images look like they were designed for 3-D glasses. But in Rydman’s work, the three-dimensional space isn’t the goal so much as a point of departure. Rather than contriving a convincing illusion of realistic space, these images dis-illusion the various “spaces” they represent.

Mighty, real
This doesn’t simply mean that they aren’t convincingly “real” or obviously artificial either; if anything, they’re, well, “really artificial.” Rydman’s images literally exist in three dimensions, however thin those dimensions may be. Reduced to a state of pixellated semi-abstraction, Rydman’s gel-transfer surfaces seem to me to hum with an almost bacterial kind of life. This sense of animation is aided by the subjects Rydman habitually references in his work: signs, old photographs, art history, diagrams—items often strange and incongruous in themselves, but made stranger still through the artist’s formal mutations.
In “How are you son?”, for instance, Rydman reproduces a photograph of what appears to be the carcass of an elk, laid out to be measured, obviously the trophy of some absent hunter. Not exactly an innocuous image to begin with, the figure is made even more lurid through the formal strategies of the artist, which render it both oddly real, and really odd. It’s this kind of dialectic between form and content that gives Rydman’s work its energy and wit. At his best, Rydman achieves something in his work that art critics like to call “content”—that strange fourth dimension of a work greater than the sum of its parts. Which is to say, Rydman manages to synthesize the particulars of form and subject into something that “means” more than both those things on their own.

Content with one’s lot
In this case, content translates as images that are not simply “about” themselves (a dead elk, a Bic lighter, a Renaissance portrait), but rather about the nature of images themselves—and, consequently, image culture. Rydman’s tactics work like slow motion close-ups in film or big bars of space in a poem. They make what’s missing—what we don’t see (and maybe what we can’t see) visible. This only sounds like a paradox; in fact, we can never see what it is we’re doing or what we really think or feel. It’s only the trace elements of these gestures that we have to work with and cobble together into something meaningful—and only provisionally complete. V

by MAUREEN FENNIAK

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