Maritta Tapanainen & Byron Ryono: paper & bronze

This will be the first solo in the Jack Fischer Gallery for the collage work of Maritta Tapanainen and the second solo for Byron Ryono’s sculptures.

Maritta Tapanainen is known for her intricate, subtly shaded multi-layered collages. Tapanainen hunts for paper treasures in flea markets, used bookshops, and junk shops. This search for collage material brings fruit in the form of all kinds of outdated textbooks, encyclopedias, tomes on the natural sciences, medical instruction and technical manuals, which are then sliced, cut, and reconfigured in a way that evokes riffing by a jazz musician. In fact, there is a musical rhythmic quality to the work as your eyes travel over the collages’ surfaces. The ephemera become fodder for the pieces she builds, as they are in fact built in what seems layers. These meticulous re-imaginings might be construed as the micro-workings of cell structures. The collages begin to take on the appearance of detailed drawings or stop-motion fragments of energetic cells undergoing a coalescing into newer and even more complex organisms.

In contract, Byron Ryono’s work rings like an echo. His unique one-of-a-kind bronze sculptures appear to take one of Tapanainen’s elaborate visions and transform them into a distilled three-dimensional object. Ryono’s organic sculptural shapes seem familiar but upon closer examination, the less familiar they become. Viewers are beguiled into perceiving them as if they were well known but soon see something brand new and almost alien. Ryono provides a micro view where natural objects are concentrated into their absolute essence. Tapanainen meanwhile explores the macro, as if her eye is hovering drone-like over a full world.

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