To the Author of the Last Page: David Ryan Viray

Margins and Detours

There is a particular kind of freedom in refusing a straight path or a clear-cut practice. In the recent works of David Ryan Viray, painting becomes less a destination than a series of openings, thresholds where decisions are made, abandoned, and reworked. To The Author of the Last Page reads not as a conclusion but as a provocation. Who really gets to decide when a painting is done, when a story seals itself shut?

Anchoring the exhibition are ten paintings that act as its gravitational core, expansive and unafraid to hold contradiction. The textbook floral arrangement of sunflowers, with the accompanying figure asking what’s left. A book decapitates rather than expands. Still lives seek their own light. A donkey rides the carriage instead of pulling the load. Directionals muddle as they meddle into which paths to take. An operation falls into chaos, complete with flying documents, when monkeys intervene. A white cat invades the image like a phantom, blocking the view of who is actually missing. A queen nurtures her wily subjects while indulging in vices herself. A figure goes through the motions of chopping a tree without tools. A man contemplates life as he flirts with smoke.

Viray also presents twenty small framed works on paper, intimate sites of experimentation where collage, mixed media, and straight painting come into play. These pieces feel like side quests, moments where the artist tests ideas in motion. They feel quick but not careless, like thinking out loud but with your hands. Perceptive viewers may see studies for bigger works, full paintings in miniature, a proof of identity and nation, figures reduced to lines, left left up up right combos instructions, cozy explorations in light and shadow, a stow away portrayal from a series, familiar animals (shown as they are and not romanticized to have human characteristics like in trending videos of bullied macaques and nihilist penguins), and codes for deciphering (or not, because they are easy on the eyes as they are). These pieces give an as is where is, take it or leave it vibe with Dadaist insinuations, but in their visuality, serve as fully complete, standalone pieces ready to hang.

One may only imagine the artist’s thought process in pursuing these projects, or perhaps it’s an incessant need for solving problems and probing possibilities. The works linger in ambiguity and openness, as if the next chapter is just right after the next corner or the canvases’ edge. We become not merely passive witnesses, but co-navigators in a glorious, epic journey, and we may jump to our own conclusions as we naturally do or even choose our own adventures.

So no, there’s no last page waiting at the exhibition, no final image that ties it all up. Whoever THE author of the last page is, we will never know, but perhaps a little self-reflection on agency, awareness, and a thirst for well-rounded actuations will suffice. As Viray offers a collection of artworks borne from honest work, he comes clean: his production thrives in the choosing, the revising, and the doubling back. Maybe the last page does not even exist, because it’s not about finishing the story. It’s about keeping it open long enough for something unexpected to happen, and whatever freedom it is that the artist enjoys, he shares with his audiences.

Kaye O’Yek