Ryan Mendoza

There is no doubt about it, someone doesn't like us much. From neighbor, to fellow employee, to the phantoms of our collective unconscious, to terrorist cells, to a populous, to Islam. Someone doesn't like us. Ryan Mendoza, an expatriot American, knows this well enough, and he tries to convey it to the spectator through his paintings. We all know that someone in the world does not like us much. All you have to do is look around to understand it. Someone doesn't like us much at all. That's what Mendoza says to himself and this exhibition is the result of his personal discomfort.

At his last exhibition in Milan, ‘Fear in a time of Superheroes,’ Ryan Mendoza idealized fear by initiating a discussion on the most harmless and infantile figures in American mythology, already uncovering the seed of contradictions. Instead, in this exhibition, the artist confronts the relatively new phenomenon of the transfer of shame and the ubiquitous reality of being hated.

Eight paintings, eight subjects that revolve around the condition of not being loved.

Mendoza doesn’t hesitate to come forward and say that he feels at times distinctly unwanted. "As an American I am on shaky ground, especially now and here in Germany. The Germans after the Second World War seemed compelled to create a kind of ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve done’ paintings. Now it’s our turn.”

So thoughts are still on America, on its culture and politics, toward which Mendoza feels estranged. But now, there are no superheroes: in their place, on large two meter square canvasses, you find King Kong, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, but also a small dog in a cage, a little girl brushing her teeth, a man and a woman embracing one another, unaware that they are being aimed at.

For Mendoza, what counts is not to be able to transmit fear, or to exploit the banality of the immediately recognizable images. Mendoza is not trying to make horror films. Nor is he a toothpaste salesman. If anything, Mendoza cracks open a doorway into what could be dubbed the new American psyche.

In 'Someone doesn't like you very much,' the painting from which the show takes its title, a tragic irony dominates the space. Who is the man falling? Was he pushed by someone, did he trip, did he jump? Something tells us that he is precisely unwanted. Excess baggage. Dressed in a still buttoned suit his cutout figure is far removed from the row of men in the background who are lined up and uniformly costumed. Was the unloved antihero pushed by them or did he take it upon himself to jump out and away from some unseen sufferance. The shadow of terrorism is palpable. Here the memory of 9/11 is lodged in the falling and in a waffling scream.

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Ryan Mendoza "Someone doesn´t like you very much"