HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

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OVERVIEW | CV | PRESS | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

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Drawing is a crucial part of Raymie Iadevaia’s practice. While photography and digital tools have become more commonplace in contemporary painting practices, for Iadevaia, the exploration of marks on paper remains the most fertile ground for his expansive imagination. Titled Love Song, this suite of works deliver a sonnet from the artist to the act of drawing itself.  A selection of five works on paper, each instrumental in developing paintings from his breakout year of exhibitions, are featured in the viewing room from April 24 – May 30. The presentation is accompanied with a text by the Brooklyn-based artist Michael Gac Levin.

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MICHAEL GAC LEVIN on RAYMIE IADEVAIA

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I have this idea of Raymie in a constant flurry of artistic activity. Basically a Looney Tunes sprint, a rotating scribble of motion. Painting panels–increasingly large–fill every available space. Paper is laid out on the floor and in every nook and cranny. The tornado churns. Globs of paint fly in every direction, careening through the air. As they slap against waiting surfaces, they leave mysterious images. Each flying drop is an egg hiding a world within an opaque shell.

Another idea: Raymie is out there collecting eggs. His visual world is filled with them. Easter eggs, everywhere. Colorful shells of paintings in waiting. He finds them on morning hikes through Griffith Park, up in Mendocino, by the ocean at night. They have an arresting exterior which is plainly visible to all of us. It is the beautiful sunset, the photo-worthy mountain view. But they have an interior as well. A cloistered mystery. And this is for someone who wants to take the time. Because that interior is our interior. A place where we sense our entanglement with all existence.

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This is the “oceanic” feeling that Freud never had much use for. Turgenev felt it in the forest. Lying down and looking up, he found himself looking deep into the sea, his soul churning. Raymie’s pictures are full of forests and seas. Easter egg places. The views Raymie favors often feature a distant peak. Even when it is not there, it’s there. Look closely at the horizon in one of the forested scenes. There is always a common structure, a vertical, the prospect of ascent. It is sometimes a city skyline, a skeletal Victorian house, a copse of scraggly cypresses, even a negative space zipping right up the center of a composition.

I often think of Raymie’s works as further views of Mt. Fuji. Hokusai’s interest in Fuji is linked to the thousand-year-old Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. In this story, a humble man cuts a bamboo stalk and within its inner compartment he finds hidden a magical baby from the moon, the size of his thumb. Childless, he brings the baby home to his wife to raise as their own. Afterwards, he discovers that every stalk of bamboo he cuts holds a nugget of gold inside. Easter eggs, everywhere.

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Raymie is searching in his work, an aspect I sense most in its raking tactility. Although the frenzied, patterned strokes rhyme beautifully with Burchfield, I doubt they are coming from the same place. In Burchfield, there is a powerful sense of enclosure, of being within a resounding inner chamber of natural space, of being deafened. In other words, Burchfield paints from inside the egg. Raymie’s strokes seem to hunt. To wend their way through a great expanse with only touch as a guide. He’s trying to find something through a thousand bristling sensations. That distant peak, the celestial link, rhymes with it but is not the thing itself.

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My six-year-old daughter has recently taken to hiding things, often very important things, in hard -to-reach corners of our apartment. Her delight at “tricking” me is as palpable as my dread that she will soon forget where she put the important thing. Squirrels are known for this, and forests evidently grow thanks to their short memories. This phase of hers appeared out of nowhere with the force of a natural phenomenon. And it is constant. A flurry of activity. A Bugs Bunny tunneling through bedding and couch pillows. I hear this is common to children her age.

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Whatever spiritual need is gratified in children’s impish hiding has its corollary in Raymie’s fiendish search. But it is adults that traditionally hide Easter eggs for children to find. This strikes me as a carnivalesque inversion. It dismantles the hierarchies of big and small, weak and powerful, that conceal our common claim to basic humanity. The ritual reveals the order of our collective interior, an oceanic world, hiding in plain sight. It is gold, our most ancient link to the sacred, rising out of that distant peak.

– Michael Gac Levin

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RAYMIE IADEVAIA was born in Newport Beach, California in 1984. The artist received a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Berkeley, California and an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, California. Recent solo exhibition of Iadevaia’s work have been at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, New York and the Pit, Los Angeles, California. Group exhibitions of Iadevaia’s work include: Greener Grass at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, New York; Cute Gloom at Lauren Powell Projects in Los Angeles, California; Search Party at My Pet Ram in New York City; Run with the Wolves at The Pit in Los Angeles, California; and Office Group Show at Bozomag in Los Angeles, California. Iadevaia lives and works in Los Angeles, California. 

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MICHAEL GAC LEVIN was born in Los Angeles in 1984. The artist received an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2015 and a BA from the University of Chicago in Illinois in 2006. A solo exhibition of Levin’s paintings and drawings, Old Skin Horse, took place at Woody Gallery in Brooklyn, New York in 2021. Group exhibitions that have shown Levin’s work have taken place at: My Pet Ram in New York City; Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York; and online with Far X Wide. Levin’s work has been featured in Artmaze Magazine and Maake Magazine. Levin has completed special projects online for the Jewish Museum and SCREEN_.