Portland-based artist Ralph Pugay’s new solo show at Adams and Ollman invites us to witness life’s undercurrent from multifaceted and often fascinating viewpoints. The exhibition title, The Longest Journey, invokes the magical realist adventure video game from 1999, in which the player controls the protagonist on her journey between parallel universes. Pugay’s eleven paintings and site-specific drawing installation are presented across the gallery’s two spaces, manifesting a contemporary interplay between the IRL and social media realities of our day-to-day lives.
The exhibition opens with Butterfly Village (2023), an alluring present-day Garden of Earthly Delights (Hieronymus Bosch) that pictures adult humans in various states of emergence from butterfly life stages – crawling naked out of larvae, peeking out of chrysalis, or standing full-frontal with resplendent butterfly wings. This jewel-like painting is a reminder that we continue to go through stages of life as adults, shedding our former selves, and giving birth to new versions of us. This is perhaps especially true for those of us whose childhood or adolescence were interrupted by trauma and displacement, or followed the inner timelines of queerness, with its own stages of emergence. Pugay had writer Sara Jaffe’s reflections on queer alternatives to chrono-normativity in mind as one inspiration for this work. [1]
Almost fifty drawings are installed in the inner chamber of Adams and Ollman in an impressive visual cacophony that shows the artist as his most free. Cherry-picking and distilling images from viral TikTok videos and daily newsfeed, Pugay invokes the highs and lows of a generation given to checking out from IRL life in favor of a scrolling reality. These ink and crayon drawings embrace joy, desire, and vulnerability, and are entangled with the world’s changing gender spectrum, family structures, and social behaviors.
Beard Family, in which body size is the only demarcation of difference, invokes alternate and fluid imaginaries around role play and family constructions. (It simultaneously hints at the force of social reproduction in the heteronormative nuclear family.) In Zebra Butts, humans are given birth to by surrogate animals. Like a random social media feed, we see newly hatched chicks appear, as well as a dominatrix on a scooter, and special agents in wheelie bins.
Pugay is a gifted draftsman, and he frames these works by painting an architectural mise-en-scene directly onto the surrounding gallery walls with casual aplomb. A fetish leather-masked man lifts his leg to make way for a fellow human to mop the floor, and Pugay suggestively places a mooning butt drawing over the smokestack of a wall-painted ship.
Even nestled among this dazzling array, Pugay’s tiny ink-on-paper rendering of Koko, the gorilla is magnificent. (Koko, an inhabitant of San Francisco Zoo, went viral in the ‘70s and ‘80s for his ability to communicate with humans. [2]) In Pugay’s work, the primate looks at us with such wisdom, empathy, and an implicit query of whether we realize what we are doing to him, that it is questionable which is the more intelligent of our species. That Koko has taken to the care of other animals – three kittens cling to him for protection – shows that more equitable power dynamics and loving approaches are possible. Indeed, Koko reappears in another small drawing, learning sign language, debunking one of the last barriers between us.
Pugay’s respect for the companionship of animals is equally poignant in Panic Attack in Bed, a sketch of a furry cuddle whose title lends weight to how animals are there for us when humans have failed us. Funny Thirst Trap invokes (unfulfilled) human desires; the sketch’s red-eyed cat leans its body against a bathroom doorway, with a sexual posturing familiar from social media.
Other drawings seem to reflect on and question the social compartmentalization of addiction and houselessness from other aspects of everyday life. A pastel and watercolor entitled Meth Cavern is a quirky but thought-provoking image of drug users, forced underground with the scorpions and snakes, with a defecating individual becoming a visual shorthand for the acts of exposure that accompany houselessness. A pencil drawing dubbed Tripping Neanderthal shows a distant ancestor slumped on a rock. I read the ink drawing Man on the Freeway as a portrait stand-in for the omnipresent human beings begging on our streets, whose framing on the page echoes the passer-by view from a car window.
As if to acknowledge that many of us blinker ourselves from these struggles in our midst, other paintings in the main gallery depict our means of individual and collective self-preservation with notable irony. Meditation Competition (2023) is a dryly humorous reflection on the wellness industry, replete with big brand sponsorship. Acupuncture School (2023) presents a cohort of bodies sticking needles into other willing bodies while holding DIY-acupuncture learning books in one hand. The various facial expressions of these amateur acupuncturists, from outright fear to casual boredom, is a hilarious, yet insightful reflection on the ways in which we move through this world as a society.
Acupuncture School is hung next to and echoes the gestures of another painting, Sarcophagus Workshop(2023), which depicts “classical Egyptian” artists happily adorning anthropoid coffins. By rehumanizing a culture that is elevated and preserved (and thus made unrelatable and static) into a living reality, Pugay creates an unexpected parallel to his own position as a fellow painter. A long-term Portland resident with an immigrant Filipino background, Pugay often uses humor and self-reflexivity to massage and tease out flattened, ossified, and othered identities, reconsidering issues around cultural equity and difference from other facets. I find it noteworthy that this image is of Egyptian culture specifically, given how its “exceptional” cultural status creates an imaginary distance from its location in Africa, which exposes the racist structuring of the canonized cultural pecking order.
However luscious and absurd Pugay’s works might appear at first sight, they belie a keen sensitivity to social inequity and a strong awareness of its deep roots in history. This comes to the fore in The Pilgrim Underground (2023), a work depicting a group of lantern-bearing colonists who seem to live on in an underground hole. This significant painting is an uncanny reimagining of how history lies just below the surface of contemporary life. While the dominant historical narratives are written up retroactively to appear justified, the familiar yet ridiculous presence of these starched collar European individuals denaturalizes what now appears self-evident; namely, the settler colony that is the United States.
The impossibility of continuing to separate our privileged pleasures from the damage we have caused and continue to inflict on this earth is conjured by Raver Rescue Mission(2023), a painting that shows nocturnal festivalgoers in glow in the dark attire being airlifted from by military helicopters. In conversation, Pugay discussed how this painting was inspired by the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction happenings at the Burning Man Festival in 2023. Widely portrayed as a free-spirited, counter-culture event, the annual festival’s tech-elite funding and permanent carbon footprint on the Nevada desert was largely overlooked until climate change protestors descended upon this year’s edition. As if to prove their point, unprecedented rainfall hit soon after, with the festival goers’ annual “elective luxury suffering” giving way to a mud bath that left them trapped and struggling to survive, rather than merely posturing desert living.[3] Rendered in acrylic in neon against nocturnal and camo shades, Pugay captures the event as an iconic portrait of human follies and their entanglement in social and political contradictions.
The Longest Journey is a deeply human, joyfully alive, and thought-provoking show and a testament to the breadth and depth of Ralph Pugay’s practice.
"Ralph Pugay, from Portland, paints bizarre, circus-like scenes: Catholic schoolchildren stripping a nun, a wrestler ripping an opponent in half (head to toe!), an ancient Greek jacking off lions. While they’re paintings, I can’t help but think of some your neons: the slapstick death-erection in Hanged Man, or the cycling penetrations and punishments in Sex and Death by Murder and Suicide. Those pieces, like Pugay’s paintings, amplify the unwieldy, wonky aspects of the human body through absurdist situations."
Out-loud laughter is not usually something you hear at a paintings show, particularly one inside of a museum. However, this is the reaction I saw over and over again, as I stood among Portland artist Ralph Pugay’s (NAP #97, #115) paintings, at the Seattle Art Museum. Filling a small but highly trafficked gallery that was wedged between exhibits of glass and of traditional nineteenth and twentieth century American art, the artist’s small canvases excelled at catching people off guard. The flattened, cartoonish scenes captured the eyes of people en route to another space, who would wander towards them with looks of befuddlement. The point at which the artist’s frank titles, absurdities and language games began to sink in was the moment the laughter began.
Rothkos in Space exists exactly as described: it shows a constellation of mini-paintings floating around a command center. The characters staring into the Rothko force field would not look out of place in Futurama or Space Ghost Coast to Coast; their pointing and pondering is almost torturous—if this were a real cartoon show, any art nerd would want to see it and to know what they are saying. But, looking at this piece inside of a museum, where an actual painting by Rothko often hangs in a nearby gallery, Pugay’s painting constellation starts to look more like real-life. Works of abstract expressionism have become such tried and true crowd pleasers that they are now strategies, status symbols and selfie backgrounds as much as they are paintings, hanging in a cultural intersection as strange as a Rothko in space.
All the Poor in the Same Place more sharply addresses the art world’s absurdities, showing artists painting people eating tacos from a dumpster, from the other side of a fence. More than just another meditation on the questions famously raised by Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of others, the specifics of Pugay’s scene make its commentary more immediate. The back alley taco service bears striking resemblance to the taco trucks that recently underwent a social evolution, from low- end to high-end cuisine. Formerly known by their derogatory term, “roach coaches,” the food trucks once affiliated with blue collar workers and lower income urban neighborhoods have become beloved by a more elite, mainstream food scene; the roach coach has become aestheticized, not unlike the dumpster being turned into paintings in Pugay’s scene. The way we turn the relationships around us into works of art, and the way art changes our own relationships, can be both laughably absurd and utterly serious, just like the worlds Ralph Pugay creates.
9.22.2014 | The Oregonian Ralph Pugay at Upfor, Wendy Red Star at Portland Art Museum and more: October gallery preview Written by John Motley
Ralph Pugay's paintings are funny, which isn't a descriptor that most serious painters would welcome. But Pugay has developed a signature style that ostensibly flaunts its naiveté, while serving up loaded subjects with a smirk.
Pugay's less than reverent attitude toward craft tends to rankle old-school practitioners, who are still attached to technical virtuosity as its own endgame, but open-minded viewers are catching on. In fact, Pugay was the winner of the 2014 Betty Bowen Award, receiving $15,000 and an upcoming show at the Seattle Art Museum, which opens Oct. 16. But first, he'll unveil "Critter" on Oct. 2, his debut solo exhibition at Upfor.
The show features Pugay's characteristically absurd vignettes, from dozens of spiders eating popcorn strewn in a sticky web to a close-up of a stovetop, where butterflies are fried in a saucepan. One standout from the new work is a painting titled "Foreigner," which pictures gridlocked traffic on a Spaghetti Junction-style freeway, presided over by a faceless pair of eyes and levitating cigar.
Stylistically, one observes the cartoonish influence of Phillip Guston or even Saul Steinberg, but the heart of the painting — an outsider's invisible isolation — is no laughing matter.