Art Review

Body of Work: Sharon Ryan’s new works on paper at Remba have only the slightest physical presence, but the ramifications of their process run deep. Half of the small, lyrical images in the show were painted using the artist’s blood and urine, the rest were “drawn” with strands of hair, both Ryan’s and her friends’. As the title of the show implies, these are “Drawings--Of the Body,” not just drawings of the body.

In keeping with the intimate origins of her materials, Ryan’s images, too, center on the most intimate parts of the body, the genitals. A penis articulated by strands of hair applied to a silk backing, or a vagina lightly rendered in the pale warm tones of blood are not as sensational as they sound, nor as engaging.

Ryan’s most interesting efforts are those that exploit the more abstract, calligraphic potential of hair of different colors and degrees of coarseness. The most enduring--and ironically, the most erotic--of the painted images are those that transcend anatomical description to tap a more primal vitality, through sinuous lines and more vague, automatic biomorphic shapes.

Bodily fluids are not new to the arts--think of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or further back to Chris Burden’s orchestrated gunshot wound or Vito Acconci’s masturbatory “Seedbed.” Ryan inserts herself into this charged tradition with her own private variant. The work is innately performative, but quiet, even whimsical. What makes it startling and moving is its resonance between subject and substance, the primal circularity it enacts between life and its expression.

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* Remba Gallery, 462 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-1101, through July 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.