“All Natural”, Erika Ranee’s first solo exhibition with this gallery, presents seven abstract paintings that approach the artist’s life between two types of environments: New York, where she currently lives and works, and the West. rural Massachusetts, where she grew up and returns frequently. His art – collage, shellack, sprayed and coated – obliquely documents various facets of his daily existence: from family (some pieces feature drawings of his niece’s braided hair extensions) to intimate events in his head, at home , and workshop. As a child, Ranee aspired to be an ornithologist, which is fitting given the woven accumulations of layered marks that recall the history of their own process.
Rarely painted standing, Ranee’s work uses a wide formal vocabulary, but his skeins of flowing drips and beads of spray paint remain among his most recognizable movements. For example, in How many times do I have to tell you how much you love me (all works 2023), an ultramarine pool rises and rakes in the center of the composition, but is entangled with the chorus of adjoining marks that surround it – a moment that exemplifies what the artist calls his “intuitive visual freestyle “. Although she draws inspiration from, among other things, the wild graffiti of the 1980s and the rough surfaces of Jean Dubuffet, Ranee’s art possesses a singular freshness and grit in its synthesis of influences.
Over the past twenty-seven years, Ranee has moved from using explicit imagery that examines racist black stereotypes to something more CoBrA-esque and suggestive. The narration, however, is still retained, as it anchors the more prosaic or recognizable elements of the work, such as the cannabis leaves in The tree that gives and paper cut philodendron plants in mother-of-pearl. These paintings challenge a widespread essentializing position that an artist’s identity must be communicated literally through their subject. Ranee’s show melds our expectations beautifully with a lush, bountiful, hard-earned type of abstraction.
