Adams and Ollman is pleased to present Säntis Bindle II, an exhibition of paintings by Ryan McLaughlin. The exhibition brings together a select group of works from the past decade, tracing the artist's sustained investigation into the formal and conceptual possibilities of painting. Säntis Bindle II reveals an artist deeply engaged with the materiality of paint and art historical traditions, while also examining language and systematic structures and other informational frameworks. Working between figuration and abstraction, McLaughlin demonstrates a steadfast commitment to exploring how paintings are made and how images are constructed, read, and experienced.
McLaughlin studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and, immediately after graduation, moved to Berlin, Germany, where he lived and worked for fourteen years. He later returned to the United States, living successively in Georgia, Florida, New York, and Massachusetts, where he is now based. Itinerancy has profoundly shaped both his visual library and his painterly practice—the latter necessarily compact and easily adapted to new settings. Some of the works on view have passed through multiple cities, accumulating information, marks, and meaning along the way; their surfaces bear the quiet evidence of this extended life.
The exhibition takes its name from Mt. Säntis, a peak in the Swiss Alps that was a constant visual presence during the artist's 2015–16 residency in Heiligenberg, Germany. The allusion to this highly visible landmark, along with the word "bindle," a symbol of the transient lifestyle, marks both a fixed point and a constant state of wandering. This exhibition represents the artist's return to the title Säntis Bindle, which was originally used for his solo show at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2018.
Landscape plays a central role throughout the work. In Mistral (2018), a graphically structured meditation on landscape, shells, fish, and other marine-like elements are scattered across the picture plane as if carried in by the cold, dry wind from which the painting takes its name; these elements connect the artist’s time in both Europe and southern Florida, where the painting was made. Elsewhere, language itself alludes to place in titles such as Metro, Taiga, Weste, Boca Raton, and Soil.
The still-life tradition also serves as an important point of departure for McLaughlin's work. Rather than depicting objects directly, he dissects and distills their symbolic meaning and compositional logic—relationships of color, spatial tension, and balance—into unexpected arrangements. The influence of the genre appears in his careful staging of forms across the picture plane, where elements hover between representation and abstraction. In the earliest work in the exhibition, Sour Duck Collage (2010), a stylized duck is bisected by fragments of fruit, cake layers, and energetic wave-like patterning that together form a surrealist homage to the classic genre.
Underlying all of McLaughlin’s practice is a sustained interest in systems—frameworks that organize information, perception, and visual order. McLaughlin's bold typographic forms, flattened spatial relationships, and use of language animate many of his works. Words, fragments of text, and typographic references surface within his compositions, functioning as poetic markers that shape a painting's rhythm. By integrating linguistic forms into abstract structures, McLaughlin investigates the relationship between reading and seeing, between information and emotion. Drawing on signage, print culture, and the visual economy of graphic design, he adapts these conventions into painting, producing compositions that are at once legible and illegible, highly controlled yet visually immediate.
Occasionally, McLaughlin's paintings become pure abstraction. Color, mark, shape, and brushstroke—each decision or action—dissolve into an overall energetic and atmospheric field. In these works, the viewer might most closely understand McLaughlin's craft and the time spent alone in the studio searching, experimenting, exploring, and wandering.
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