Ryan Mosley’s paintings depict vividly coloured and multi-layered worlds that are fantastical and hallucinatory, inhabited by imaginary, peculiar figures. They are bearded, afro-headed, or hatted, can be gender ambiguous or zoomorphic, and are dressed in eccentric outfits that transcend all trends in fashion. Appearing on the canvas either as part of a scene, or alone as a portrait, they evolve and dissolve and balance between representation and delusion.
Ryan Mosley painted these series of large, enigmatic portraits with the intention to create a visual, though fictional, family tree. By using an oval canvas as the base for his portraits, a historic pictorial device, Mosley deliberately chooses to escape from the ‘the constraints of modernity’, as he formulates it. At the same time, however, by portraying the figures in his own distinctive painterly style, Mosley renders the works contemporary and avoids employing the principles of traditional portraiture. Mosley explores the paradox between historic and contemporary portraiture that is inevitably at the heart of these works.
Primitive Ancestry XII and Primitive Ancestry XIV are an important acquisition for RAMM’s collection as they both celebrate and challenge the notions of western art. Furthermore, his work confronts the portrayal of the black subject, which has been rarely depicted in this manner within western classical portraiture. The comparison with Mosley’s work will allow RAMM to engage in a deeper discourse on the nature of historic and contemporary portraiture and help the museum to display more ethnically diverse subject matter.
