Ralph Dee Corners: Procession

Grice Bench | Los Angeles | September 21 - November 2, 2019

Procession presents a survey of works on paper spanning the late 1960s to the present by Ralph Dee Corners (b. 1942, Monterey Park, CA; lives and works in Santa Barbara, CA). Over the past five decades, Corners has honed an idiosyncratic visual language, infusing exacting linear figuration with pulses of abstraction. He builds his compositions through dense networks of narrative tableaux, deploying the grid as a formal substrate to anchor his scenes. Despite this, his subjects tend to defy their own tabulation. They reach and glide beyond their geometric boundaries, thrusting themselves into the spaces of multiple stories at once.

Creatures consistently emerge and reemerge throughout Corners’ imagery as if drawn from a personal bestiary of esoteric figures and fauna. He plots them within characteristically kaleidoscopic swaths of color, charting innumerable paths for the viewer’s gaze and amplifying his protagonists’ disparate psychic states across individual works. With each motley cast of characters, convergences of seemingly conflictual feelings abound: brutality and frivolity, pathos and eros, toil and repose, ecstasy and remorse swirl among the shock of the accident and the awkward sting of the hollow punchline. While recurring archetypes of cowboys, angels, and impassioned lovers suggest an attention to pop culture clichés, these figures rarely measure up to their stereotypes, curiously failing to inhabit their most conventional attributes. Amidst these dramas, bodies and their surrounding geographies exert dynamic forces, inevitably intertwining, becoming mutually generative.

Photos by Paul Salveson