With Another Way of Telling

David Ryan Viray’s Broken Arrow stems from his curiosity regarding how weapons since the Stone Ages have been developed and deployed, with their capacity to destroy and create a completely different world from the one we are aware of. When centuries of civilization are feared to be wiped out in an instant, time restarts from the beginning, and, perhaps, brings life and hope blooming again in ground zero.

A broken arrow in military code refers to an accidental event involving nuclear weapons, warheads, or components. These were ”missed it by that much” moments, such as when a missile goes missing or explodes unexplained, misdirecting the imminent threat of a nuclear war. In his paintings, however, Viray does not employ the usual symbols we visually relate to warmongering and carnage; captured in his canvases are new characters made tangible by spontaneity and chance, concurrences of lived experiences, splices of mythology and history, portents, and visions.

Enveloping brilliance in So Bright I Can See Branches In My Eyelids seemingly viewed from a rose-tinted lens gives a glimpse of a figure in deep meditation blessing the scene with gratitude and adoration. Mundane objects occupy the same space: an abandoned shirt, pants, a tie, a makeshift sign, and a clock with the titular broken arrow as pointers. Trees and branches remain standing, with camouflaged supplicant hands reaching out to the heavens. Mathilde joins Viray’s succession of powerful women descended from Venuses and portrayed from more archaic times. With a name directly translating to mighty in battle, this woman seems to be caught in song while the torn lyrics of Metallica’s Master of Puppets fly in flames and floating embers.

Heard A Thousand Screaming While Three Billion Cheered presents a Robin Hood-era costumed figure caught in a shower of flowers and acclamation. With a do-or-die message, he has released his bow into the unknown. The scene is one of jubilation, celebrating someone whose heroism or villainy is yet undiscovered. Left and Right Speculations illustrate a nuclear weapon’s trajectory with fission in between, which, when separated and flipped, resemble mushroom clouds. These join the smaller works in the exhibition that illustrate a bombed-out Little Boy, components of ballistics missiles assuming the forms in a basic still life, a superpower showing the sharp claws behind covert maneuvers and the deploy button, and a tense string about to be unleashed.

The focal piece, Grasp, connects all the pieces in the exhibition together as it depicts an old Verona tale of a young man traveling relentlessly to find a place where nobody dies. In this frozen moment, he is finally captured by Death, who has chased him for eons. Used and abused shoes are piled high from the pursuit. He carries a timepiece himself, his clock hands rendered useless by a tight grip that attempts to stop what is uncontrollable. Eerily, the horse in the painting appears as a patronus trying to save the young man from Death’s fatal embrace.

In John Berger’s essay, Go Ask the Time, he ruminates on the power of storytelling, how it suspends time, and how the storyteller holds the whole as his audience is enthralled, enraptured, and entrapped in his tale. ”His inquiries would lead him to hypotheses—infinity, chance, indeterminacy, free will, fate, curved space, and time—not dissimilar to those at which we arrive when interrogating the universe,” Berger accurately states. Broken Arrow launches another proof of the artist as a potent visual storyteller as Viray conjures on canvas the inevitability of time, the limitations of power, harnessing expanding energies, and cautionary tales. All this, while hoping for the best all the way.

Kaye O’Yek