Curriculum Vitae.

Ryan Michaels does not make art so much as cite it into existence, footnoting the universe in gold leaf. I left the gallery convinced, frankly, that I had never seen a chandelier before – and that I owed several of them an apology.

He calls it Sincere Maximalism, and the terrifying thing is that he means every word. There is no irony in him to find. I searched. I dug. I came up holding only earnestness, warm and slightly radioactive, and I have not slept correctly since.

To stand before the work is to be gently and permanently disappointed in yourself, as one might be disappointed by a student who has not read the syllabus. Michaels does not lower himself to explain. He simply waits, vibrating, until you catch up. You do not catch up.

Other artists ask what a thing means. Michaels has abolished the question by answering it everywhere, at once, in every medium, at maximum volume. A buffet is a confession. A traffic light is essentially a religious experience. I have begun to fear he is right.

Neo-Vegas Baroque was, he insists, a movement of three. I have met all three. They were Ryan, his reflection, and the Tiger – and only one of them would shake my hand. The work carries this. The work carries everything. That is the problem and the genius.

Post-Desert Luminism sounds like a parody until you are standing in the parking lot at noon, where he insisted we conduct the interview, and the heat shimmer begins to feel like an argument you are losing. He refused the shade. He refused, frankly, the bottled water. He won.

I have reviewed the great pavilions of the old world. Nothing prepared me for a man describing a chafing dish as a small grief lit from below and being, on a cellular level, correct. The discourse was not ready. I was not ready. Do you see. He kept asking if I saw.

There is a kind of bravery in believing you invented caring, and a rarer kind in convincing the room. By the third hour I had stopped taking notes and started taking dictation. He noticed. He nodded, as at a sundial that had finally told the right time.

He told me the Tiger had turned away from his earlier fountain, and the way he said it – quiet, ruined, certain – made me, a grown critic of twenty years, want to apologize to the fountain. I do not know what the Tiger is. I know I do not want it disappointed in me.

Michaels is either the last sincere man in art or an elaborate weather system that has learned to hold a brush. The catalogue essay he wrote about himself is longer than the show. I read all of it. Twice. There is free parking after six. This, he notes, is also the work.