This essay was commissioned for a publication to celebrate one of the three winners of the 2025 Ars Viva Prize (published by Distanz Verlag), Ryan Cullen.
To be in a state of decadence is to bask in demise, to grasp at chimerical liberties and their riches, visions of which have been plucked from political fabulation. Virtue is weighed not in works or deeds, but in the accumulation and documentation of contrivances—decorations of empire.
Ryan Cullen’s studio is situated in a former apartment. About ten years ago, his landlady decided to undertake modest renovations to the building: a large supporting wall was evidently missing from the middle of one of its rooms, and the ceiling was caving in. Builders were hired, calculations were made, and temporary steel beams were erected to support the roof. But progress soon wrenched to a halt—the landlady’s marriage was falling apart, and she was beginning divorce proceedings. Somewhere along the way, the planned structural repairs were forfeited, but a dramatic impulse toward redecoration persisted.
In the midst of existential catastrophe, many people find it comforting to fixate on trifles. The little material comforts of peak capitalism, the warm glow of the endless scroll, soothe like cough syrup, coating the gullet and bidding sleep through polyphonies of ruination. Root causes, if they can even be comprehensively determined, appear too gargantuan, too expensive, too impossibly intersectional to attempt to untangle at the level of the individual. In this way, cosmetic changes appear to have moved up the chain of urgency in Ryan’s landlady’s mid-divorce redecoration. Her particular vision became fixated on the apartment’s lighting design.
As any diva is apt to remind us, lighting is crucial to defining the use of space (1). The unforgiving brightness of fluorescent overhead lighting demands worker productivity, discouraging forgiveness; the sleepy eroticism of table lamps casts shadow puppetry on lovers, obscuring weird rashes and stretch-marks. But it is the romanticism of the wall sconce, perhaps giving the impression that a guest is always about to enter or leave the room, that appears to have tempted Ryan’s landlady. Light from wall sconces doesn’t disperse across furniture or faces, but hugs the walls in an unobtrusive, womb-like glow. The apartment—and her relationship—may have been crumbling, but Ryan’s landlady would have ambiance.
So it was that thick channels were carved into her apartment walls in anticipation of wiring the sconces, all before any structural repairs to the space were made. Upon entering Ryan Cullen’s studio today, you would be confronted with the consequences of his landlady’s now-abandoned inspiration, a composite landscape of poorly laid plans preceding tragicomic results. A series of expressively cut passages through plaster haphazardly veer toward the centerpoint of his studio’s recessed wall, in the process brutally exposing a dermis layer of brick. Accompanying the gashes are ‘beautiful-mind’ pencil scrawls of complicated arithmetic, calculating the overshot targets.
In Greek tragedy, hamartia refers to a tragic flaw or an unintended error that precipitates a change in a character’s fortune. A series of sequential decisions is enacted in a way that continuously shifts the protagonist further and further away from their original ambition, cyclically re-orienting their actions toward contending with the unforeseen consequences of their decisions. The result, typically, is a sequence of events that feels, at the time at least, like the only feasible path to follow, even as the protagonist spirals deeper and deeper into calamity. Although panicked and increasingly irrational, an audience member might still note the protagonist’s overarching inspiration, or rather, neurotic obsession. The protagonist will remain driven by the persistent delusion of their own destiny, even as it ignites exponential chaos. This is commitment: the trenchant duty to continue, however ridiculous, however hubristic, however Fitzcarraldian the mission.
Such are the auto-annihilatory concerns of Ryan Cullen’s work. His practice seeks out, rather than eschews, neurosis as form: the tragicomic descent of plans gone awry, the dissonance between inspiration and outcome. This is not a matter of schadenfreude; Cullen sets out to memorialize specific moments within recreated chronologies of disaster—states somewhere between the ecstasy and resignation of doing and becoming.
Undergirding these moments is the presence of symbolic imagery as, in Cullen’s words, a “counterfeit currency” of globalized racial and extractive capitalism, itself in a pointlessly indulgent apocalyptic death spiral. The pathological amassment of images—the need to capture moments and hurriedly disseminate them—emerges as mere palliative recourse for society’s anthropophagic tendencies, a nostalgic form of hoarding for end times. Cullen chooses the painstaking, unironically laborious task of transmuting those very images into painted and sculptural form, literally and metaphorically retracing the decisions they depict, and the consequences that precipitated their documentation. In doing so, he invites the possibility that meaning can be produced by hard work alone, not merely by its naming as “artwork.” He thus nods at the impotency of pursuing art-making: a chosen profession that, for all of its lofty intentions and highfalutin talk, rarely manages more than flaccid performativity.
In the case of his landlady’s wall sconces, Ryan’s transmutation of his source material takes the form of a free-standing sculptural reproduction of his studio wall. Like a living room set in front of a live studio audience, only the frontside of the wall, replete with the builders’ intrusions into its plaster, has been painstakingly recreated. Its artifice is betrayed with a peekaboo plexiglass backside, revealing that the sculpture is, in fact, not a fully functional wall, but mostly made up of various kinds of foam. In the guise of a historical recreationist continuously debating the root causes of conflict, Cullen focuses his labor on retracing the fateful gestures leading up to the abandoned installation of the wall sconces. This time, though, he supplements his landlady’s vision, and its outcome, with a flourish of historical fabulation, adding to the path of destruction painterly reproductions of the famous Dolphin Frescoes (1600–1450 BCE) in Queen’s Megaron at the Palace of Knossos, Crete. In doing so, he points to the cyclical reverence and ignorance of what is commonly termed cultural heritage, and the tendencies of revivalism to mould some idea of history into the fashions of the present. In Cullen’s rendering of the situation, the wall channels are now carved into a reproduction of the Minoan frescoes, adding a layer of pastiched desecration to this slapstick minor tragedy. Once again, a central concern of Cullen’s emerges: image symbolism as self-destruction—the denial of tradition by continuous reformulation.
The reconstructed studio wall represents a new phase in Cullen’s work, from rendering documentation of situations, to rendering the situations themselves, and the decisions (or lack thereof) that precede them, in the round. His paintings offer a similar approach to an archeology of fateful decisions. In his 2024 exhibition Protestantism in Painting, at Brasseries Atlas in Brussels, the central painting transmutes an image mined from a US military training archive: three closely-cropped hands, entwined in a binding grip, signal the intimacy of hand-to-hand combat methods, still taught in training facilities even though the US military industrial imperative privileges the sterility of video game-style drone killings in its proxy wars.
Accompanying this work is a tightly grouped series of eight close-ups of plastic water bottles, and the contorted optical effects they produce via the branded ridges of their moulding. A symbolic chain reaction linking touch to industrial complex emerges: the moulded grips of the bottles become a vector to examine the proliferation of PET water bottles, which first emerged in the 1970s, as an omnipresent (and oppositional) symbol of convenience and environmental destruction. Void of human subjects to grip them, but framed to resemble transparent humanoid torsos, the water bottles take on a strange sensuality. Their plastic ridges skew the temporal relationship between immediacy and plastic infinity, use and disposal.
Cullen’s images seek out symbolic meaning not through their status as images alone, but through the effort it takes to render them in paint. In his accompanying artist text for the exhibition, Cullen lays out his thesis on transforming labor into meaning as an essentially Protestant system of painting: an obsessive-neurotic structure whereby the act of painting alone is not redemptive. It offers no opportunity for repentance or deliverance, as a Catholic system might. Instead, the Protestant system of painting is distinguished by a belligerent compulsion to do “good works” at any cost. Put in another way, he distinguishes the “Catholic Person-Who-Paints” and the “Protestant Painter” as follows:
“The Catholic Person-Who-Paints presents her performed shame.
Hers is a process of aestheticizing inadequacy, a theatricalization of anxiety. A
contemporary painting of the Catholic system is not so much a PPainting as it is an
index of performed guilt. Justification of worth is a clerical process determined not
by the “good works” themselves, but rather by the mere fact of their existence.
The Protestant Painter presents the result of her shamelessness.
She too recognizes her inadequacy, but knows that sentiments of guilt and shame,
whether real or performed, have no effect whatsoever on deliverance. In fact, the
Protestant painter, deep inside her heart, may very well feel that she is not among
the Elect, the saved; she may have some inkling that she is not a Painter. Alas,
there is no way of ever knowing which list she is on, the most a Protestant painter
can do is act like a Painter in as hardcore a manner as possible.”
I’d like to pause here on the psychiatric diagnosis of “obsessive-neurotic” or Zwangsneurose and return to the archetype of the lunatic on a fool’s errand (2). Cullen is currently working on a film project-in-progress, tentatively titled Eastern Western. Set in Latvia in 1992, two years after independence from the Soviet Union was proclaimed, the film invokes the culturally distinct process of post-Soviet land privatization and restitution through the Western film genre. The Western is suffused with themes of territorial expansion and personal justice. Customarily, a stranger arrives in a lawless town, set amongst a hostile and barren frontier. Their presence is spectral, registered with fear, suspicion, or hopes of deliverance by townspeople. Guided by revenge or (more likely) a hero complex, the stranger confronts an antagonistic force, whose moral decrepitude, in the eyes of the stranger at least, must be challenged in a climactic standoff.
In Eastern Western, a foreign cowboy arrives in a Latvian town seeking to take back a villa that once belonged to his bourgeois grandparents. Upon arrival, he finds that a Latvian mother and her two cowboy sons have been living there for years. In 1990, Latvia decided to restore property rights to individuals who had owned land prior to nationalization in 1940, metaphysically reintroducing the concept of private property to a failed socialist utopia. A convoluted and compromising legal reality soon set in: former owners and their heirs, many of whom had spent the previous decades outside of Latvia, were now pitted against those who had remained and made use of collectivized land. Unlike in other former Soviet countries, where land restitution practices were also undertaken, only Latvia chose to restitute land even when it had been significantly redeveloped under communism. This meant that the landowner was very often a different person from whomever owned or leased the buildings and amenities that stood on that land. In 1991, the Latvian government sought to regulate mounting disputes between land owners and land inhabitants via private lease agreements, a solution very few inhabitants were willing to enter into. At present, at least one tenth of Latvian society is directly or indirectly involved in property grievances (3).
Long embedded in the Western genre is a leitmotif of paranoia, deriving at least in part from the uncomfortable reality that all ‘Western’ land is in fact stolen and expropriated land, and that any legal claim or proposed right to its settlement contravenes this reality (4). The classic paranoiac scene of a cowboy walking down the main street of a hastily shuttered town is, perhaps, reflective of the protagonist’s at least cursory knowledge that they are enacting a destiny myth riddled with historical exclusion and moral inconsistency. The cowboy’s reality isn’t just blinkered, but representative of the way desire denies the co-existence of contradictory realities. Here again is a centrally recurring theme in Cullen’s practice, of the return of (ideological) ghosts, and how they confront the living. The ghost, caught in a spectral void of its own hamartia, can only make its presence known amongst the clatter of everyday life. Indeed, the collapse of one regime, and the institution of another, is never totalizing. People, and all the filaments of everyday life, must persist amongst the traces of past hegemonic experiments, and the clumsiness of new ones, all of which hold their existence in the balance.