RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Josh Dorman: Idyll ~ Idol  a solo exhibition of recent works which are an investigation of the artist’s longstanding interest in creating multi-layered and self-contained universes of antique collage material, acrylic and resin. Dorman’s two new bodies of work, the Being series and the Wallpaper series, take a new approach to the allegorical world building for which he is known. 

To create his complex and visually rich paintings, Dorman culls old textbooks, maps, diagrams, and, for the first time, introduces antique wallpaper to his compositions. By starting off with a base of material from another time, Dorman dislocates the physicality of his paintings from our contemporary era and creates an ethereal, almost other-wordly dimension, which often serve as allegories addressing contemporaneous issues. The initial collage of archival material — some over one hundred years old — gives the artist a visual noise to react to: “It’s like gathering a pile of stuff then excavating the image from within” the artist explains. Dorman’s delicate and time-intensive process involves successive layering of collage, acrylic and ink, at times pouring resin or sanding down his surfaces, sealing in or obliterating the previous layers. 

Neither portraits nor landscapes, the paintings in Dorman’s recent Being series, on view at RYAN LEE, are subjects in and of themselves. With his endlessly intricate, multi-layered compositions, Dorman brings to “flesh” a being with each of his paintings. “Each Being looks back at us, with many sets of eyes, through the air of their own dreams,” Dorman explains. “We feel their presence and wonder about our own. Each porous, without boundary. Assembled of eyes and visions, ears and sounds, brains and minds, teeth, and voices. We are memories, calculations, histories, cells, roots, beauty, fear, love, and joy. The paintings are assembled, found, constructed, and excavated, evolving in layers over months and years.”

The paintings in Dorman’s Wallpaper series—which he refers to as Idylls—makes further use of this concept of dislocating time: using antique wallpaper from the 1930 to 1950s, Dorman roots his Idylls in the false nostalgia conjured by sentimental, idealized Americana landscape scenes. The wallpapers—which the paintings are simultaneously rooted in and a commentary upon  —offer “a strange vision of America,” one that does not correspond with its historical past or daily realities. Indeed, Dorman began incorporating these anachronistic visions of a genteel, pastoral America during the pandemic, in the midst of political strife, racial tension and a mounting climate change crisis. The Idylls strive to find beauty, peace, and joy in darkly humorous illusions of/allusions to an imagined past.

Both series on view at the gallery represent a complete surrender to the artist’s internal world and vision. “All are completely discovered in the making,” Dorman explains. “My goal was not to force or even will images into being but to layer, labor, and carve forms until the beings or the idyllic worlds earned their existence.”