Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art is pleased to present “Welcome,” a series of new paintings by Oakland-based Ryan Martin.

Working in oils, Martin composes vivid portraits and fantastical pastoral scenes of young men and young women, often with young reptiles, young pachyderms, and young ungulates. A stylistic virtuoso, he uses smooth, groomed brushstrokes to render flora and fauna in electrified photorealistic detail while deploying broad, expressionistic flourishes of color and texture for background.

Martin’s paintings are titled after popular songs by artists such as 2Pac, Madonna, and the Smiths, and ostensibly serve as interpretations of the songs’ lyrics. At the same time, the paintings are imbued with an ineffable symbolic code, falling somewhere between the pagan and the biblical, the art-historical and the collective subconscious. Executed with a boundary-pushing palette, the effect is placed yet jarring, threatening yet whimsical. The canvases recall in their way, the self-confidence of the late Italian Baroque: bold, lavish, dramatic, unabashedly humanistic and utterly devoid of cynicism. They remind us (thankfully) that the medium of painting will always and inevitabley re-emerge from its periodic dormancies to offer ever-new creative frontiers for succeeding generations of artists to explore, interpret, and express.

Born during the Reagan Administration, Martin was, until recently, a student at the California College of the Arts (CCA). He has exhibited with Mark Wolfe Contemporary at art fairs in Miami Beach and New York, and in group shows at Bluebird Art House in Whittier. This is his first solo exhibition.