Soldered brass, 15.5 x 18.5 x 7, 2023.
Fool’s Paradise is built on a turned, urn-like pedestal that carries a frontal, heraldic arrangement of cast and stamped brass. The title names a state of illusory contentment, a happiness founded on a mistake. Milton gave the idea a topography in Paradise Lost, where the Paradise of Fools is the place that receives vain hopes and misdirected devotion. The sculpture supplies an inventory of such things. The zodiac disc stands for the belief that fortune is written in the heavens, the putto and bird for love and its messengers, the bottle for the elixir or philtre, and the ring for the promise of permanence. Every one of these is an instrument of credulity, and each is rendered with total sincerity in gleaming brass. The work holds the persuasive surface of hope and the hollowness of its apparatus in one frame.
Wings organize the composition. The bird’s wing is feathered and pale gold, the putto’s is small and cast, and the pierced grille on the right reads as a butterfly wing, while the filigree crescent on the left extends the same gesture in a third idiom. Three registers of flight (animal, allegorical, ornamental) are fixed to a heavy turned base that cannot move. The sculpture is an apparatus of lift on an anchor, which is a reasonable diagram of wishful thinking.
The removable cap on the faceted bottle adds a second layer. The vessel is the compositional summit, and it can be opened to reveal a concealed cavity. As in Love Letter, made the same year, the work contains a literal interior. Here the interior takes the form of a bottle, with its associations of remedy, poison, and message in transit. The viewer is invited to take the cap off, and the cavity holds whatever its owner chooses to put there. Any contents would be as unverifiable as the promises depicted around it. The paradise of fools is, in the end, the place where one has already decided what’s inside.
Formally, the piece draws on the soldered and welded assemblage tradition of Picasso and Julio González, and on the American constructed sculpture of David Smith and Anthony Caro, where found parts are held in tension and resolved into a unified composition. Unlike the vertically stacked, tilted mass of Love Letter, this work spreads laterally and is symmetrical enough to read as an emblem or a coat of arms. The forks, branching stems, and ball terminals at lower left give the left side a limb-like, almost insectile character, which counterweights the heavier cluster of putto and fluted cylinder at right.
Within Ryan McCourt’s practice, the work continues the shift from the monumental steel drawn from oil industry residue toward the scale of the table and the domestic object. The salvage logic is constant. The register here is satirical where Love Letter is tender, and the work uses ornamental brass, the material of trophies, tableware, and keepsakes, to examine the human appetite for comforting fictions.
