Just use magic

According to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, giving life to the past, reconstructing it, was not about the restoration of the original creation, but about its projection and reinvention, as it should have been formulated. Preferable to ruin was distorted creation. Viollet-le-Duc was an important architect of the Gothic revival, with restorations such as the Citadel of Carcassonne or the Castle of Roquetaillade. He was the architect hired to design the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty, but he died before the project was completed. His ideas were opposite to those of John Ruskin, who was a defender of respecting the original work when dealing with the past.

This interest in simulacrum (closer to Viollet-le-Duc than to Ruskin) and the Gothic revival is one of the axes that orbit around the work of Ryan Browning. The central axis of his work is the claim for a neo-medieval iconography, which takes inspiration not only from the castles of Viollet-le-Duc, but also from those represented in video games and animated series of the 80s, such as Dungeons & Dragons. Browning defrosts Disney’s body with candles screened in 3D, to incorporate his bones, or Mickey Mouse’s hands, into his canvases. Like Mickey in the film Fantasia (the 1940 animated musical anthology), Browning orchestrates elements inside a dark but sweet cave, with rounded edges.

The idealized past, which is no longer timeless, is embodied in his paintings and sculptures. As Disney’s body (which was in fact cremated and buried days after his death in 1966) it becomes real and emerges from myth, it unfolds in an ancestral, primal, and present time, so filtered by legend that it is built in self-reference.

In the painting Just use magic, a baguette floats in space, like the magic wand of a card trick. In Doha – the city where the artist currently lives – authentic European style bakeries are hard to find. This type of bread was developed in Vienna in the mid-19th century before Doha was founded as a city. Imitation probably delights Qataris: the copy of a recipe and tradition decontextualizes, fulfills its function, and builds a story.

A fable, full of remains, some bones stripped of flesh but not of life, appear in dark catacombs. Fragmented vestiges hold a black, static smoke, in his Smoke Crafter sculpture. Death as an anthropomorphic identity was first represented as a skeletal figure in a black robe in the 15th century, also in a medieval context. Its function was to guide the soul towards the other world, and that other universe is the one that Browning illuminates with his curly candelabras from the Renfield B canvas.

Twisted shapes, which can be candles, viscera, bones, or stalagmites, mix symbiotically in the sculptural piece Pastel gesture. Metamorphosis as magic, in a dream world, or sweetened nightmare, where the human presence is sensed through allegorical, sacred, or disturbing elements like a sickle or chains, that profess a faith – or sentence – for illusionism.

The guardian of the cave crowns the spear in I’m still smilling, he has given way to the heroic underworld, to the magician, allowing Browning to rescue codes and mechanisms and turn them into pieces. Through collage between elements, found objects, 3D printing or epoxy resin, the artist shapes sculptures that represent frozen moments of light, smoke, or ingenuity.

Two upside-down wooden cats are the basis of the sculpture Try to be realistic, they are the ground connection of an obsolete mechanism that is linked through them to what is local. Ryan went to search for them at the Consell flea market. Flea markets are those places where identity surpluses are resold; we find objects that at that decisive moment can magically be converted into waste or desire, depending on the value given to them by the new perspective.

Browning says that “going east is easier than going west”, perhaps there are fewer borders, or walls. In the Lemon Pastiche piece, a silhouette is drawn between the walls of the neo-medieval fortification, designed in thermoplastic 3D printing. A wall is recreated with light and shadow, and the slabs on the panel work as macro pixels with an indefinite personality.

This identity is also due to the artist’s training in history, which makes him aware of a remote past, from which he incorporates references also distant from his own geography. In Houston, he saw castles through screens, and navigated them with a joystick. Chiaroscuro and neo-medieval iconography are fused in his work with boomer and millennial popular culture.

According to the artist, “the future will be deep” and neon lights will emerge from the stalagmites. The Stalag sculpture was created not by condensation of minerals from water, but by creative decision.

To activate the time machine, Browning uses unstamped, unreferenced golden coins, which like the golden disk, thrown into the void of the universe with relevant information about the species, activate the Subterranean Appliance sculpture or float in the Renfield B painting.

Magic, the cave, that which is ethereal and ephemeral, configure the spaces on the canvases or collapse in his sculptures, in these creations that emerge from a shadowy past, to see the light in Browning’s hands and aspire to eternity.

This exhibition was supported (in part) by a VCUarts Qatar/Qatar Foundation Faculty Research Grant.

María José Ribas Bermúdez