
Matthew Ronay
Perhaps it’s his artworks’ eye-popping colors, antiseptic corporeality, or intractable otherness—or, for that matter, the difficulty of speaking about abstraction to begin with—but something leads viewers of Matthew Ronay’s carved-basswood sculptures to consider them initially as products of citation: as accumulations of formal motifs or references that the spectator is tasked with identifying. Ren and Stimpy, “Cow Tools,” Frederick Kiesler’s biomorphic Surrealism, anatomical models in the urologist’s office, Yves Tanguy, undersea coral. And while dutifully surmising such “influences,” real or