Continuing through May 31, 2025
“Forma pura/pure form” pairs two artists, Bay Area-based sculptor Byron Ryono and Mexico City-based photographer Patricia Lagarde. Ryono, who explores the nature of matter and perception, embarked upon his journey in welding and casting in 2010 after a brief period working with ceramics, jewelry, and photography — not to mention 30 years in the business end of the tech industry ( He states that he is “a young artist in an old body.”) Lagarde decided early on to become an artist, pursuing studies in art and design in the early 1980s. Her work uses diverse photographic processes to create visual poems etched in light.
While Ryono’s earlier works at times related to his love of bird-watching, the artist’s recent concerns are formal, as the exhibition title implies. He draws inspiration from the monumental metal and stone sculpture of Basque artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), widely known for his public art installations.
He also pays homage to the legendary Gee’s Bend quilters, resourceful women living in an isolated Black community in Alabama whose minimalist textiles were lauded by the New York Times in 2002 as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” A third generation Japanese American, Ryono’s third key point of reference is the emphatic form of the samurai chonmage “top knot.”
“After Gee’s Bend” I and II (2015) were inspired specifically by a quilt made by one of the group’s best-known artists, Mary Lee Bendolph. Ryono’s geometric patterns quote those of Bendolph’s quilting blocks — the pieces of fabric which form the quilt’s design. Both quilts are energized with quirky irregularities, rectangular sections that twist, bend, and curve. “After Gees Bend I,” the sole wooden piece here, is painted black on the vertical surfaces, and an eye-popping candy-apple red on the horizontal planes. All remaining works are cast in bronze using a lost wax technique.
“After Chillida IV” (2025) has a strongly graphic quality, suggesting ideograms. One could also imagine the towering forms of buildings, or an industrial construction site. It’s difficult to resist a desire to see these on a much larger scale. “After Chillida IV’ and other works in this series tower at all of about a foot, so the reference to scale is strictly implicit.
This raises questions about our physical relationship to a work of art, and of a work of art to the environment around it. Does large scale automatically imply “better,” and if we feel it to be so, why? Or is the impulse to have artwork dominate its surroundings a convention that has become outdated?
Imbued with a different personality, the artist’s “Chonmage” works, such as “Chonmage IV” (2025), use a flattened circular shape, like the letter “O,” from which a bulbous protrusion thrusts at an insistent angle. These, with their reference to the distinctive hairstyles of Japanese samurai warriors, have a more figurative presence and activate the interplay of yin and yang, opposing yet complementary elemental forces.
Lagarde’s photographic work similarly explores themes interweaving the forces of nature and science, of light and dark. Her “Trapping the Moon” series consists of a dozen small gelatin silver prints hung in two long horizontal rows. Mysterious and evocative, they depict thin sheets of scrim, a lunar image projected on each of their billowing surfaces. Following an impulse to attempt the impossible, the series involved the artist in quixotic misadventures at night on a windswept beach. Ultimately, nature won the battle in this contest of wrestling fabric, props and camera gear against the elements. Lagarde’s theatrical facsimile was ultimately improvised in the studio.
Lagarde often employs vintage techniques such as ambrotype and ferrotype, the latter also known as tintype, using plates of glass or sheets of metal instead of film. Coated with a light-senstive emulsion, the plate or sheet is exposed to a large-format camera and then developed in the darkroom. Her ferrotype print “Nefertiti” (2016) displays a head, appearing like a fragment from a colossus. It lies on its side in a desolate setting as a tiny silhouetted standing figure observes it, arms crossed in contemplation. The image evokes how man is dwarfed in the face of the infinite.
In other works Lagarde embraces high-tech digital technologies, including piezography printing. Introduced in 1999, initial experiments in the new printing method replaced CMYK printer cartridges with four varying shades of black ink. By doubling the optical resolution of the printer and using up to seven shades of black carbon ink, piezography enables artists to create prints with greater detail, smoother shading, and rich velvety blacks.
Among the most striking examples of this technique are “Snowball Earth” (2015), featuring a blistered globe, the allusion to climate change impossible to miss. In “Las Islas del Cielo” 4 and 5 (2004) we see a moody vista over a horizon line, captured in a fuzzy circular halo.
With both artists’ works featuring strong geometric elements and a high-contrast monochromatic palette, undergirded humanistic concerns and a playful impulse lie behind the surface formalism. Ryono’s sculptures offer an impression of angularity, and the appearance of density and weight. Lagarde’s work is more rooted in nature and emphasizes circular/spherical forms: the moon, the earth, the sky. In “forma pura/pure form” Ryono and Lagarde find a wealth of potential in the familiar, in timeless forms around us which provide a universe of matter we can see and touch, but whose true nature remains unknowable.
