Mr. Bryan Ida gives us a beautiful meditation on human intervention in natural forces with his Deep opening at Billis Willliams Gallery. The prima facie cryptic ideal which involves precious wildlife and terraneous forms imposed with geometrical rectilineal forms is best understood as the rational extension of the human mind onto a world which forever beyond its grasp. It is in the misconstruing of humanity’s abilities at serving itself which blinds it to distorting and injuring the natural habitat to which it is born into, yet typically uninvolved with. Mr. Ida’s is a timely message to keep humanity’s fate grounded in a natural governance rather than one constantly self-imposed.

Yet this caution appropriately lacks an anxiety, a desperate appeal, one of frenetic energy, of harsh castigation of man’s attempts at perfecting his society at the expense of the Natural world. This is where his art is beautiful. It is in this delicacy of approaching the goal – that man’s goals are forever laughable when seen by The Most High – which brings forth greater concepts of subtlely. Namely, dimness in his tones.

Bryan Ida, Red Panda, 2022, acrylic on panel, 21×24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Billis Williams Gallery, Copyright 2023.

Palos Verdes Blue, 2023, acrylic on panel, 25×18 in., courtesy of the artist Bryan Ida and Billis Williams Gallery. Copyright 2023.

It is not an ominous dredge but a cool gentle opaqueness which Mr. Ida spectacular demonstrates with his smaller compositions. Not so much drenched in dim darkness and then lathered with an invisible lick of red, or blue, or green – each as a ingenious representational testimony to the source of color, Nature – as it is an almost haunting impression of light that is being dimmed, turned down, but not off. Here the intensity of living color gives humanity the choice to turn the dial up, or to be negligent in being a good steward of the Earth.

And yet, we do not have a sense of forlornness in the forgetfulness of a return to Natural innocence, that of a veneration, not domination, of the Earthly world. To be content with the peace of being in balanced with its incalculable calculus of elements – wind, air, water, fire (all fundamentally electromagnetic) – rather than anxious about more juice, more points, more rational yet theoretical tabulations of reaping, yet does the sowing multiply and bear more fruit? How can it when the calculations are not enduring, but span barely 120 months, when the red panda has survived for more than a million years?

Bryan Ida, Nature’s Way, 2023, mixed media on panel, 47 x 41 in. Courtesy of the artist Bryan Ida and Billis Williams Gallery.

Further, the geometrical imposition is a brilliant idea to introduce man-made exactness to the ungraspable planetary movement without again being vociferous in the criticism of Earthly injury to the limits he or she indeed imposes upon it. For what is a physically measured line but one which is limited completely in value or quantity of measure?

Bryan Ida, Orangutan, 2021, acrylic on panel, 24×72 in. Courtesy of Mr. Ida and Billis Williams, Copyright 2023.

To be lost, to be asleep, to be in the dark, to not aspire to the light, without a cry for help – this is the positive affirmation of Natural Beauty of the Creative Order born before the human mind by Mr. Ida. To realize Nature has always been ordering unto a perfect fulfillment – completeness – requires this quantity of negation in order to deepen our perspectives on true necessity being always beyond the rational faculties of the total human population – forever and for good.