Chadwick Rantanen’s present at Bel Ami performed out on two registers: One set of works, a surprisingly standard sequence of walnut-framed coloration images of wierd preparations of objects, flora, and the occasional fauna, held on the partitions at the usual 60-inch peak. The opposite, a sequence of small fashions of staircases and ladders produced in skinny plywood, hung a lot decrease, at shin or dollhouse peak. These parallel shows (all works 2022) steered two exhibits put in without delay, phasing out and in of sync. Press Match (Ladder), for example, a skinny stepladder that, at 5 inches excessive, appears like a smudge on the wall, resembles the woolly brown object in the course of the sidewalk depicted in Farmer Gene—which, in flip, echoes the longer, angled strip of grey tufts of grass rising from the crack in the identical picture. Simply as ladders have twin rails, the vast majority of the pictures’ compositions are laterally mirrored. Window, a shot of a pane of foggy glass, is break up by a finger wiping it clear down the middle—and this fats vertical is itself doubled to the correct, as by the grass, with a skinny diagonal smudge.
Rantanen typically places the “mediated” in media. His earlier sequence of sculptures elaborately, superfluously dealer connections—between lightbulbs or batteries and their sockets, for instance, with overbuilt adapters formed like lobsters or butterflies, or between the ground and ceiling of just about any gallery or studio by way of extendable struts lined in prismatic foil. His modeled objects are flagrantly synthetic, or clever. The tiny staircases, ineffective as such, are laser-cut and notched collectively in a format often reserved for the flat-pack souvenirs at a science heart present store (the titular “press match” kits), meant to be punched out and assembled into the ribs of a T. rex or the armor of an M1 tank. The sculptures’ machine-induced discoloration troubles their dollhouse calm—just a few of them haven’t been cleaned and nonetheless bear the smoky hatching of the laser’s burns, an impact one thing like rust creeping down fireplace escapes. What do they join?
Each sequence share this picket, maquette high quality. The sculptures dangle flush towards the wall by some delicate tape or cleat, showing to drift. Press Match (Staircase) features a aspect representing the outside wall of a constructing, minimize with three home windows, hugging the supporting floor in order that the steps seem to protrude not simply from an imaginary tiny constructing however from the gallery too. Different ladders are oriented as if to serve the wall. At the very least two have “patches,” locations the place the laser etching implies that the edges had been damaged and splinted again along with tape or rags, providing a little bit of character to those crisp-cut constructions.
Circling the room, a customer might see two images held on parallel partitions become visible without delay—to the correct, close to a nook, was Wood Boards, a vertical closeup of two blocks of darkish, stained wooden, and to the left, just a few toes deeper into the house, was Wood Boards with Flower, which depicts two very related blocks, additionally framed roughly symmetrically, however this time with a cluster of yellow flowers rising by way of the central hole. The wooden resembles, or perhaps is, the grainy walnut inventory framing each {photograph}. These quotidian scenes seem in superb artwork costume; their formalism pervades the room. Descending from the mezzanine-level gallery, you marvel how the steps would look as a mannequin; you marvel how the double doorways would look as a photograph; the world seems replete with formal correspondences, replete with artwork—pointless bits of magnificence between issues.