AMORPHOUS BODY STUDY CENTER

Nasher Sculpture Center exhibits Matthew Ronay’s largest and lengthiest sculpture.

INTERVIEW BY BRANDON KENNEDY

Matthew Ronay’s The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode opens at the Nasher Sculpture Center this October. With his most ambitious work to date, the Brooklynbased sculptor lines up all the angles as we negotiate our relationship with encountering a form expanding in tone and complexity, all the while being observed in turn.

Brandon Kennedy (BK): In preparing for your exhibition at the Nasher, you felt the Lower Level Gallery called for an architectural answer initially. How did you envision this and where did it lead you? Matthew Ronay (MR): The first time I experienced the space I felt its theater-like quality, the stairs forming seating tiers and the glass wall a proscenium. Initially I wanted to have a series of horizontal works on pedestals that graduated higher, mimicking the stairs, but I abandoned this direction. Nevertheless, I held on to the sense that the image of the show develops as you descend the stairs. BK: Can you speak to how your original concept transformed during the years of the pandemic in relation to your solo gallery exhibitions at Casey Kaplan and Perrotin Shanghai? MR: I understood immediately that I would be making a large single work for the room. I don’t enjoy scaling objects up because I’m comforted by the limited scale my body imposes on my work. This left me to concentrate on the horizontal. I began to practice drawing exaggerated horizontal forms to prepare for the exhibition as early as 2018. I took the opportunity of making similar-oriented sculptures for an exhibition in Shanghai to stretch my making muscles in preparation for the Nasher work. Halfway through working on that show the pandemic happened. The Nasher was postponed, and my experience of the pandemic folded me inward as I watched the ambition of creating a large work shrivel. Making intimate, discrete works felt centering and allowed me to speed up the evolution of my language. Eventually I returned to the concept of a large horizontal

work, but my approach to the problem of producing something so long had completely changed. I then used my 2021 exhibition at Casey Kaplan to put into motion some of these new experiences. The biggest change was that I began to combine drawings to make horizontality instead of drawing the entirety in one sitting. BK: Color plays such a whimsical and sometimes confounding element in your forms. Can you tell us a little more about how you think about that relationship and what mediums you employ to achieve this effect? MR: Color is something I have to work diligently at since I am a red/ green color-blind person. I work on color with my co-conspirator Bengü. We have been collaborating on color since 1997. We use a plentitude of techniques to coax out color choices. These usually unfold from the moment I choose which work to make and continue through the duration of its making. We often use color as a mode of misdirection, to deepen the comprehension of the piece. Color choices range from structural and logical to emotional and intuitive. Color is a parallel association with the feeling of the form. To accomplish this, we have a set of dyed wood swatches that we arrange on white paper towels and then read each other’s body language as they enter the arena of possibility. Although there are many other procedures, it would be too tedious to read about those here. BK: How has working in a long, linear format sculpturally changed the way you worked—conceptually, formally, and on this project from gestation to installation? MR: The process of linking sculptures has allowed me to investigate and cultivate combinations of objects that alone might not have worked as discrete sculptures. A small minority of the drawings I make become sculptures. When some of the discarded drawings are connected to other drawings, they create a richer whole. Working on this project has allowed me to look back at many, many hundreds of drawings with a new lens. Drawings that I loved but could never bring myself to produce as sculptures suddenly have a new attractive quality. I found that when I began drawing horizontally a few years ago, I often filled in horizontal space with ornamental flourishes. I love ornament, but it can leave me with a slight emptiness, so I settled on the additive approach of finding drawings of single works that fit together, both formally and intuitively, and I combine them. BK: How does your practice of drawing relate to how your sculptures progress? What is it like to add a third dimension—or an unseen texture or detail—from your drawing to final realized form? MR: The sculptures are the progeny of the drawing and the maker. Drawing commences in order to take samples of an evolving visual language I am stalking. I’m very rigorous when portraying in wood exactly what a drawing is saying. One extra wrinkle is that the drawings mostly portray one side of a sculpture, so my sculpting mind has an outlet when defining all other parts of a sculpture that were not outlined in the drawing. The beauty of quick drawings is that they are reckless and free, decisions are made at a rapid pace without any real ramifications. If a drawing doesn’t give me that feeling I’m looking for, I just start another. Object making shares some of these qualities too; a little more or less pressure with the tool teases out forms previously unknowable. BK: From our conversations and your entertaining—and often hilarious— lectures, it’s obvious you have a of love of language. Tell me what role words play for you and how you arrive at your titles? MR: Reading is major. I’m reading everything from lowly gossip to Guy Davenport. All of my consumption text allows me to experience my associations. Text on the internet is especially fruitful as the links are actual. One thought flows into the next with a click. During the lifetime of a sculpture, from its birth as a drawing, to its life as a thing, and its final resting place in my memory, I match it to a parallel system of thought and feeling. This is especially true at the moment I choose a title. Every image, word, sound, etc. carries an association. Associations can go like this: A sculpture is short and has some sort of tendrils…It looks low and fat…I remember a paper on dwarves in Renaissance painting that I wrote in college…I look up dwarf on Wikipedia or Wiktionary…I look at etymology… I start reading the history of dwarves in royal courts…I look at Las Meninas…This takes me to a page where it discusses dwarves in German folklore…I find the word Kobold on Wiktionary…title is Kobold. The word goes hand in glove. Text is texture.P