Ryan Spiritas

Enter Ryan Spiritas Gallery

Powerful. Expressive. Intriguing. These are just a few words used to describe the creative intuitive paintings of Ryan Spiritas. The Dallas native, instills a singularity of vision in these very personal works, whose prominence is recognized and lauded by the distinguished Texan and acclaimed artist, James Surls, as honest and profound. Spiritas instinctively exploring his own avant-garde idiom, without temper, executes the edgy aesthetic content in works devoid of a chartered course, just the pure overt emotionalism of painterly authenticity. 

As an artist, Spiritas compels paintings characterized by their visionary openness and brilliant narrative dialog, with an artistic insight that is as personal as it gets. Driven to paint by imperative intuition, his sophisticated renderings are expressionistic hybrids of psychological dimension and intensity. Sparks of inspirations lead to luminous improvisational elaborations of embedded message; primal by nature, singular by outcome.

Liberated from traditional models of representation, canvas is simply a stage on which Spiritas envisions revelations of his spontaneous aesthetic agenda. On a foundation of scraped color fields and textural patterning, follows a salvo of painterly technique and gestural calligraphic mark making, tactilely, using fingers and hands or scribed with various implements. Without artifice, an intellectual narrative is wrought in paint; of current events or deep seeded exposés of toiled memory, spontaneously translated with such intimacy with the media surface that the artist and canvas are one in the same.

“Creating art is a consoling and soothing factor in my life,” says Spiritas. “I like being the one against the canvas or piece of paper...” The artist also explores fundamental dualities and the juxtaposition of arbitrary dark reflections with his sweeping application of color that vibrates with intensity. In another duality of Spiritas’ mindfulness; seriousness and whimsy react, with each little incongruous ember of idea or image adding to the creative conflagration, by themselves an absurdity, yet, harmonious to the whole.

The techniques Spiritas uses to draw and paint continue to be self-developed through inspiration, not imitation. His inspiration: Music, especially; the band The Residents, the poet Shel Silverstein and his super-hero artist. James Surls, one of the most important sculptors working in America today. Spiritas’ contemporary work parallels the post modernist expressionist and is inspired by world-renowned artists: Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Spiritas says of himself. “I am awkwardly different, but smart. I sometimes surprise people with my abilities and sense of humor.”

Each Spiritas painting submits to an emotive journey of creativity, with every intuitive mark stimulated by, and symbiotically referencing the one before. The final image is in compositional flux until the bodywork is deemed complete and the din of its crescendo is realized by the artist. The painting now has a fully visible life force of its own, in concurrence with the artist.

Ryan Spiritas’ work is curiously companionable to collectors devoted to art; those who are able to engage as he does with the entire canvas and its fluidic confluence of imagery and articulated dialog.