Matthew Ronay

Matthew Ronay presents Cold Meat, Cake, and a Variety of All the Finest Fruits in Season;, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan. Comprising more than thirty individual basswood sculptures displayed across a series of artist-made plinths to form multiple tableaux, the exhibition approaches the cycle of making and exhibiting as a form of digestion: a continuous circuit of gathering, consuming, processing, and transforming ideas, materials, and research into physical form.

This process unfolds through deliberate excess, embracing a Dionysian mode of consumption in which abundance heightens perception rather than giving way to restraint. Like a feast that extends beyond satiation into sensual experience, the objects invite viewers to dwell in accumulation, contradiction, and pleasure. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a passage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), in which an elaborate spread of Regency-era refreshments is described as plentiful yet offputtingly mismatched to contemporary taste. Here, generosity is not understood as exchange but as immersion. Ronay undertakes the labor of absorbing and transforming disparate references (from personal ceremonial objects rooted in unrecorded traditions and funerary arts to imagined species, machines, and architecture) presenting a plentitude of forms that rewards sustained looking rather than immediate resolution.

The exhibition’s installation functions as a system for consuming the work. Borrowing from René d’Harnoncourt’s display strategies during his tenure as Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1949-1967), the exhibition’s meandering layout creates multiple sight lines by preventing a straight path through the space. Instead, the viewer is encouraged to twist and turn around the exhibition’s architecture. The objects are presented on configurations informed by the artist’s reconstructed memory of a plinth flanking a fireplace from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (built between 1918-1921, Los Angeles, CA); the arrangements reflect the distortions of recollection, where the mind stretches, compresses, and invents images. Ronay’s display structures exaggerate and abstract the Hollyhock fireplace, their surfaces treated to evoke the look of concrete. Grouped and placed atop these platforms, the sculptures resist fixed categories or linear interpretation, remaining only partially digestible.

As Ronay describes, “This strange and violent year has to be dumped into the gallery. The basswood entered the studio, was chewed up, and must exit.”

New York-based artist Matthew Ronay (b. 1976, Louisville, Kentucky) is best known for his chromatic, handmade wood sculptures that at different turns suggest unearthly landscapes with futuristic architectures and bodily processes like digestion and aging. A consummate woodworker, Ronay crafts his sculptures by hand carving, grinding, and sanding basswood. He then dyes it and occasionally applies flocking, before combining several elements together in a unified composition, transforming the materials into phantasmagorical worlds. Ronay studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art before earning his MFA from Yale University in 2000. In 2022, the artist presented a solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, in conjunction with a fully illustrated monograph. In 2016, his work was the subject of solo presentations at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida. Ronay has exhibited at institutions including Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany; University of Louisville, Kentucky; Artspace, San Antonio, Texas; Serpentine Gallery, London; Sculpture Center, New York; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky; and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. Ronay participated in the 2013 Lyon Biennale, curated by Gunnar Kvaran, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.