Glassed Beauty

Operating within an artistic climate in which both privilege of subject and indulgence in beauty are unusual, artist Gretchen Ryan has created a body of work that offers both in spades. Based in Los Angeles, Ryan recently made her New York debut at Fred Torres Collaborations, a nine-month-old exhibition space in Chelsea. Little Pretty, which was on view earlier in May, featured roughly a dozen new works of painting and drawing. Her focus is on the sometimes fetishized, sometimes stigmatized world of child beauty pageants. The sitters of this portrait series, some of whom she has been working with throughout their childhoods, are those diminutive queens whose occupation has been the recent object of controversy and cultural acclaim alike. The unlikely heroines of these grandiose images embody determination, vulnerability, and an enigmatic sense of power. Having been put in a wheelchair by an accident as a teenager, Ryan focuses on “the way we are when we’re new,” conveying a complex mixture of the oblivious purity of youth and the impending difficulties connected to the “peril-fraught transition” to adulthood.

Ryan initially honed her painting skills by training as an illustrator, and her artistic beginnings are hugely apparent in this group of work. The whimsy and fantasy that one might expect to find in children’s fairy tale illustrations here take on a more mature, critical tone. Her portraits of child beauty queens expand upon a simple idealization of youth to include sharp cultural commentary. Upon seeing these images, one recalls the disparaging media gaze that has been cast on the child beauty industry in recent years, and expects Ryan’s paintings to be unsettling. On the contrary, they have the effect of being quite inspiring. She points out that although “the girls are more perfect than they will ever be, they thankfully have no idea what that means and won’t until it’s gone.” Rather than being oppressed or compromised, her models and their youthful spirits seem to shine through in spite of the ideals imposed upon them. In her incredibly sensitive treatment of her subjects, Ryan is able to re-humanize qualities that have elsewhere been commodified. No longer objects of obsession, in these paintings, these girls become the possessors of their own autonomy. As Ryan puts it, she attempts to find “a real moment, the child in the doll.”

Ryan’s interest in 18th-century British portraiture is also a subtle but overarching presence in these works. Her lushly layered canvases contain mottled, hue-soaked backdrops, and employ soft, painterly brush strokes to describe the figures. One is reminded of paintings by artists such as Reynolds, Lawrence, or Sargent in which the children appear saccharine and encrusted in the bulk of their adornments. By means of techniques once used to portray the aristocracy, she is able to capture golden ringlets, sparkling rhinestones, layers of tulle, and the girls’ bright, competitive spirits. Without a doubt, Ryan’s images share a certain preciousness with those of her predecessors. Here though, the bondage of beauty that once seemed inescapable, instead, appears absurd and disposable. She is able to evoke a radiant grace of character even in the absence of normality. Regardless of what the future has in store for these girls, memorialized by Ryan’s brush, they remain a tribute to the obstinacy and incorruptibility of youth.