"You could say that Ryan Mosley outlines people who live in a different world. Or in another time. Or at different times. And, in fact, all of that just doesn't make sense. In Mosley's paintings, time, place, history, the characters they inhabit and the space they inhabit are all warped, distorted, confused, merged, disintegrating and recombining. In Mosley's recent work, the rigid forms of geometric abstraction are locked into a more identifiable, measured and realistic figuration. The historical time is that of the 20th century, of modernist abstraction. But this abstraction flows back to the real world — on the sweaters of his male figures, on the blouses and the dresses and tops of his female characters, on the carpets and the bedspreads and the wallpaper. The characters he portrays in many ways blend into or identify with their backgrounds; the contours of their heads, their jaw lines, beards and hair, and of their cheekbones, flatten into a surface of interlocking shapes. It's as if, in some difficult way to comprehend, the characters Mosley portrays are the paintings they inhabit."

— from the text by JJ Charlesworth

Published on the occasion of Ryan Mosley's solo exhibition at Tim Van Laere Gallery, September 1 – October 8, 2016