Review

A review of Ricky Allman's
your smallest sins are my greatest accomplishments: Recent Work

Ricky Allman's artwork graced the cover of the October 2008 print issue of Review magazine, and several of his paintings are currently on view at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri, through February 28, 2009 as part of a three-person exhibition. This painting is "The easy way," acrylic and ink on canvas, 24" x 36", 2008. All images courtesy of artist

University of Kansas Art & Design Gallery
August 24 — September 12, 2008

(some of Allman's work is also part of a three-person exhibition
that includes Grant Miller and Linnea Spransy)
Byron C. Cohen Gallery
Kansas City, Missouri
January 9 — February 28, 2009

by Christopher Lowrance

Ricky Allman’s paintings fit nicely into the slightly cool off-white austerity of the University of Kansas Art Gallery in Lawrence, Kansas. One can also imagine them looking equally at home on the walls of an Industrial Lights and Magic-designed 23rd-century outer space fortress heavily inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice, Italy. The paintings express a contemporary design sensibility informed by architectural rendering programs.  At the same time, they are tapping into a sense of excess and abundance that inspired Baroque painters like Giambattista Tiepolo. Tiepolo’s massive ceiling frescoes like the Allegory of the Planets and the Continents in Wurzburg, Germany, are filled (but for some tastefully-designed passages of empty sky) with putto, swirling clouds and draperies, super-foreshortened figures, and, of course, the occasional rearing horse’s underside. These paintings confront some of the heavier geopolitical and spiritual topics of their day with a lightness and decadence that has something in common with Allman’s address of similar topics now.

Ricky Allman, "I'm a mirror," acrylic and ink on panel, 24" x 48", 2008 (on view at Byron C. Cohen Gallery).

In terms of content, Allman seems to be creating a lightly ironic view of contemporary architectural, industrial, and urban design excesses usually at the far extremes of un-ironic. A frequent subject has been the architectural undertakings of the Church of Latter Day Saints — gilded, grandiose, and readily drawing comparisons to excesses associated with the Baroque-era Catholic Church (as in the prophet in vegas). These images are lightly ironic in a healthy sense. Their note is not really one of satire or even really criticism — it is more the sensible skepticism that individuals rightly direct toward showy signs of power or authority. This is the sort of informed skepticism that makes Comedy Central’s The Daily Show one of the country’s most popular news sources.

Ricky Allman, "The experience has been perfected," acrylic and ink on panel, 16" x 24", 2008.

Other paintings deal with other sorts of excesses, often environmental. Even when these are images of excess turned disastrous or apocalyptic, the images maintain that ironic distance. The paintings feeler redux and catastrophe schmatastrophe in Allman's fall 2008 exhibition are examples of this. These humorously titled images are a far cry from the sort of drama one might expect from paintings depicting heavily destructive mountaintop removal mining in Utah, scenes devoid of human life. One might expect J.M.W. Turner’s stormy skies, or even the dark, tar-covered textures of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings. Instead, Allman’s are much closer to Tiepolo’s sly send-ups of late empire hubris. It is a pragmatic approach to the issue that — in providing some distance for contemplation — does not turn heads away.

Ricky Allman, "Feeler redux," acrylic and ink on panel, 24" x 48", 2008 (on view at Byron C. Cohen Gallery).

Installation shot of "your smallest sins are my greatest accomplishments" at the University of Kansas School of Art & Design Gallery, fall 2008.

Allman’s work seems to belong to a sort of reformed formalism. He practices a formalism of awareness with a social and experiential agenda, a formalism with a place for beauty that is not governed by the reductiveness and reliance on simple rules and strategies that lead inevitably to such a dead-end for 20th-century artists. The paintings are full of delights, sympathetic to the human need for such things. -re-