Visual Arts
Mark Ryden's "Wondertoonel" merges fantasy, photo-realism

By Sheila Farr
Seattle Times art critic

COLLECTION OF MARK PARKER "The Magic Circus" (2001) is part of Mark Ryden's "Wondertoonel" exhibit at the Frye.

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Mark Ryden's photo-realistic fantasy paintings have the allure of fairy tales with a strong undercurrent of sex and violence. Ryden goes after the brainstem fears and titillations that bubble in our psyches. His Madison Avenue-slick presentation makes the pictures even scarier and more seductive.

Ryden's exhibition "Wondertoonel," showing at the Frye Art Museum through Feb. 13, continues a decadelong push by the museum's leadership to ditch the Frye's stodgy image and keep up with contemporary trends, while maintaining the museum's mandate to show figurative art. Seattle audiences have seen Ryden's work at the Frye before, in the 2000 exhibit "Representing L.A.: Pictorial Currents in Contemporary Southern California Art." Ryden's surreal "Princess Sputnik," a standout of that show, is back again in "Wondertoonel."

Exhibit review Mark Ryden "Wondertoonel" 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays (until 8 p.m. Thursdays), noon-5 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 13 at Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle (206-622-9250 or www.fryeart.org).

The term "Wondertoonel" isn't made up. In an essay about the show, Ryden says he took the word from the title of a 1706 Dutch book called "Wondertoonel der Nature" that cataloged a natural-history collection, the kind of odd fossils, skeletons, taxidermied animals and seashells that used to fill curiosity cabinets. Ryden says his paintings are similar compendiums of scavenged imagery, from old books, vintage toys, religious statues, stuffed animals, whatever.

With a background in illustration and graphic design, Ryden started off as a commercial artist in Southern California. He's among the painters represented in "Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art," a new book edited by Kristin Anderson, owner of Roq La Rue gallery in Belltown. The surfaces of Ryden's oil paintings are luscious, and his images seem to cast a Technicolor glow, yet there's an irresistible tension between the prettiness of the packages and the darkness they contain.

	COLLECTION OF LONG GONE JOHN "The Ecstacy of Cecelia," (1998).

Ryden puts together all kinds of surreal stuff. The vacant-eyed little girls Ryden paints, sometimes naked or wounded, radiate with the juicy glow of a split pomegranate. There are some disturbing and suggestive images, so even though the exhibition has a childlike look, parents may want to preview it before walking the kids through.

Images of meat show up everywhere — steaks and sausages hang from a little girl's skirt, a naked baby doll leans against a ham — and they usually end up suggesting butchery and sexual predation.

It's an added irony of the show that paintings like "The Butcher Bunny" (showing a little girl visiting a meat shop where a smiling-face bunny saws through a bloody ham and a dead pig lies on the counter) make an unwitting reference to the Frye Museum's history. Founder Charles Frye made his fortune through his Seattle meat-packing business.

	COLLECTION OF SUSAN MCDONNELL AND BRIAN WAKIL "YHWH," oil on canvas, by Mark Ryden (2000).

Ryden's paintings are full of familiar images plucked from the pages of art history and illustrated books. In "The Ecstacy of Cecelia," a wan young girl sits at her tiny pink piano in a room full of strange toys and cryptic emblems, the arched window reveals a perfect Early Renaissance landscape outside. The reclining young women in "Darla's Journey" and "Snow White" assume the provocative odalisque pose Manet used for his "Olympia." A miniature portrait of Bjork with the body of a pubescent doll mimics an image from an old Andersen fairy tale illustration I remember. Ryden's pictures teem with religious symbolism in the form of Buddha heads, stigmatas, bloody baptisms, yin yang signs, crucifixes and statues of Jesus.

Not all Ryden's paintings succeed in making the gut-level connection we get from archetypal images, but many in this show do. "Wondertoonel" was organized by former Frye curator Debra Byrne and will travel to the Pasadena Museum of California Art in February. An attractive catalog, with a statement by Ryden and essay by Byrne, accompanies the exhibition.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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