Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, laughs when told of Ray’s reticence. Sure, says Schimmel, who organized a midcareer Ray retrospective in 1998, formal issues of group sculpture and allusions to works like Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais are at play in Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley…, but there’s no getting around the fact that the figures doing the masturbating are all Ray: “It is what it is.”
One thing the two men, who have been friends since the Eighties, agree on is that the piece is less orgiastic than meditative. “I think it’s more lonely than pornographic,” says Ray. “I’m not with a partner. I’m with myself.” Notes Schimmel, “It came at a time when it seemed he realized he was having these relationships that in some ways were repeating themselves, and in some ways he was having the relationships with himself.” Shaun Caley Regen of Regen Projects, Ray’s Los Angeles gallery, finds his ability to subtly infuse his artwork with personal concerns to be one of his most powerful tools. “You look at Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley…, and it’s very psychological, but it reverberates on many different levels,” she says. “He finds the universal from the personal.”
Ray was raised with four brothers and one sister in Winnetka, an affluent suburb along Chicago’s North Shore. His family owned a commercial art school. Ray knew early on that he wanted to be an artist, and in the summers he took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. At age seven he discovered his other great passion in life: sailing. His father bought him and his brother an eight-foot dinghy, and the boys would sail on Lake Michigan. Ray, who has lived in L.A. for 26 years, now has a 44-foot boat that he frequently mans solo and captains in races for as long as the eight or nine days it takes to reach Hawaii. The sailboat seems to be his only extravagance. (He still lives in a modest, rented house.) But friends say that he is happier now than he’s ever been, in part because of his longtime girlfriend, Silvia Gaspardo-Moro, whom Ray at one point in the interview refers to as “my wife.” “Charley’s a very intense person,” Regen says. “He always has been, and you could see it in the work.”
Ray works obsessively but deliberately. This past spring he had his first major gallery exhibition in a decade, a widely discussed show at Regen Projects featuring a single, jaw-dropping sculpture of a dead tree; in November Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea will hold his first significant New York exhibition since his MoCA retrospective traveled to the Whitney in 1998. There The New Beetle will be on public view for the first time, along with Chicken, a life-size chicken egg pierced with a tiny hole through which the embryo’s head is barely visible. The goal, Ray says, was to create a sculpture even farther removed from the pedestal, one that could be held in the palm of your hand. “I wanted the life force, or the energy, of the chick hatching to be met with the energy of your looking—with your bending over, with your curiosity,” he explains, gingerly holding the not-quite-completed piece. Sculpted in porcelain, the project took four or five years for Ray to perfect. “I had an incubator and hatched some chickens,” he says, then, pointing to a picture of some chicks, adds, “This one died.” First he grappled with how to render the chick “without being cute.” Then he wrestled with whether the bird should be partly emerged from the egg, an idea he scrapped because, he says, the naturalism of it made the piece “more imagistic than sculptural”: There was no need for the viewer to bend over, to participate; the experience was complete. The resolved egg, with a circular “portal” allowing a glimpse of the chick, “is more about looking.”
