Book of Ruth

In his first sustained engagement with printmaking, Ryan Arenson has created a body of work at DKW that is included in a solo show at David Krut Projects. Drawing on two seminal works by Dürer and Picasso, Arenson has translated a series of his own exquisitely detailed drawings into etchings, linocuts and monotypes that reflect on Dürer’s bold use of line and the circular forms of Picasso’s 1901 painting Child with a Dove.

Arenson’s drawings suggest an almost ascetic commitment to the unencumbered clarity of a single pencil line and the purity of the circular form. As he immersed himself in the Zen-like activity of drawing circle after circle, Arenson began to cross the lines of the circles to create a wave-interference pattern not unlike the lines of Dürer’s woodcuts. What Arenson sought was a way to interpret this activity through printmaking and so, in consultation with DKW’s Jillian Ross and Mlungisi Khongisa as well as visiting New York printmaker Phil Sanders, he considered the various technical means available to him that would allow him to print a series of intersecting circles and lines without falling into decoration or repetition. The printers suggested a combination of engraving, etching and linocut, which lends Arenson’s final prints a level of technical complexity reflected in subtle variations in tone and range of mark making.

In his quotation of Picasso’s Child with a Dove, Arenson again applied himself to a series of circles to create the body of the girl. Once the girl, now Ruth, had been constructed through a combination of etching, drypoint and pochoir she seemed to carry some of the weight of her history and the artist’s technique on her frail shoulders. It was at this point in the working process that Arenson, quite literally, began to take her apart, circle by circle, until her head lay beside her. This series, called “Resurrection”, can be viewed from right to left or left to right, which means that the viewer can either decapitate the girl or put her back together again. The surprise of this invests this work and, by extension, all of the images in the exhibition, with a delightful self-reflexivity so that the art-historical seriousness of the founding impulse of the work is turned on its head (so to speak).

Other works in the exhibition include a series of small etchings that comment on the making of an image and suggest the larger philosophical meanings attached to the circle as a geometric figure and a symbol both of emptiness and completion. And finally, Arenson’s Moleskin notebook containing his original drawings serves as a key to the works on paper. It is both fetish and footnote, central but subject, at any moment, to disintegration.