“With acceleration there is no here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal…” – Paul Virillio, The art of the motor – The shrinking effect, 1993.

The car crash is one inevitable end-point of contemporary Western culture. The clash and klang of advertising – the neon pulse of fast food and fast life is the other. These glittering collisions are the landscape of Giles Ryder.

In 1970 the British writer J.G. Ballard exhibited the hulking bodies of crashed automobiles at the New Arts Laboratory gallery in London, appropriately called Crashed Cars. This aestheticisation of the car crash was an ongoing obsession for Ballard, whose novel Crash explored the erotic potential of grinding metal and shattered glass. This was the ready-made in extremis, the visceral remains of mayhem relocated into the pristine world of art in a violent surrealist gesture.

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event,” Ballard has said. “I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really; a liberation of human and machine libido….”

Perhaps comparing Ballard’s fascinations with the work of Giles Ryder is going too far, but there can be no doubt that the two share a fascination with the automobile in its most abstracted forms. With his harshly lit fluorescents and reflective automobile paint, Giles Ryder is also exploring the aftermath of modernism. His metallic constructions grip the gallery walls like immovable bulwarks, while his neon constructions dominate the floor space like a sprawling street map of a glowing and pulsating Tokyo.

While Los Angeles may be the ultimate ‘automobile city’ Ryder’s process is in fact more reminiscent of the compact, neon-drenched reduction of Tokyo. As opposed to an urban sprawl, Ryder deals with compression, with the condensation of colour, a miniturised metropolis, a compact Shinjuku.

In early 2006 Ryder was chosen to participate in New06 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Perhaps inevitably Ryder’s work was read in the context of modernist art practice, with the exhibition’s curator Juliana Engberg comparing his work to such American artists as Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman.

But far more relevant than the New York school that Engberg espoused would be such Californian artists as Billy Al Bengston, who reflected the automobile culture of Los Angeles. Many of Bengston’s paintings were finished with a surface of liquid wax, creating the hard, mirror-like sheen of a cherry roadster. Bengston was one of the Los Angeles ‘car culture’ stars of the 1960s, utilising sprayed layers of automobile lacquer on aluminum in soft colors, achieving a highly reflective, translucent surface.

An associate of Ryder’s has described his work in Australian art world parlance as a collision between Ian Burns and Dale Frank. This is many ways an apt description; an unholy marriage between Burns’ cool intellectualism and Frank’s calculated anarchy; the professorial meets the punk. Ryder’s work may look slick and finished, but the intent is much more adversarial, even menacing. With the reflective surfaces of his wall-works we, the viewers, are entrapped in this garish aftermath of a cool Armageddon.

The visceral, painterly approach of Frank is captured in Ryder’s Flurochrome/mirrorchrome [transparent radiation] M.I.R.H. 06 Portrait which was exhibited in New06. With it’s fleshy pinks and rendered in coloured and mirrored Perspex this work both reflected the viewer and immersed them in its cloying wet pinkness, which was not unlike the interior of an artery. That analogy becomes all the more chilling when one considers what the acronym M.I.R.H could stand for; Male Involvement in Reproductive Health or the MIRH Eye Surveillance system for real-time multi-face recognition for airport security. Both are strangely apt, suggestive of paranoia and deceptive surfaces.

Indeed, the materials Ryder utilises do seem deceptive. Glossy on the surface, the suggestion is there of considerable physicality. He uses metals and glass as though scavenged from some strange future.

Ryder spent six years working as an industrial painter on Brisbane’s aging Story Bridge. The intense physicality of such work filters through in the manufacture of Ryder’s creations. Ryder is not one of those artists who sketches an idea and then sends it out to the workshop to be custom-manufactured. Ryder knows his steel and he knows his paint; he is a hands-on alchemist, converting base materials into powerful, luminescent objects.

Giles Ryder - All colours fade in to the night 2004 (detail) Neon and epoxy enamel on board, timber, vinyl stickers, transformer, 200cm x 200 cm

But the process is decidedly reductive. As Ryder states: “The concept of reduction comes from the language of speed – of racing cars having stripes – that then produces a format for presentation of the machine. The interior and exterior surfaces are part of the whole simultaneous experience of modern life.”

Ryder also plays a kind of music with these objects. Utilising the rainbow hues of the highway, he marks his aluminium ‘canvases’ in disparate, clashing colours, creating a sonic resonance. The vertical stripes recall the fret of an alien guitar suggestive of the kinds of feedback one hears on early Sonic Youth albums. But Ryder is cooler, recalling the Germanic man-machine approach of Kraftwerk with their decidedly antiseptic approach – the diametrical opposite of the gritty fashion of punk.

But for all the slick presentation there is a sense of anarchy at play here; a cool immersion into a scalding hot world of consumerist collisions; Ryder reaches into the future and plucks back polished artifacts from a crash that is yet to occur. In Ballard’s words: “eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods….” Ryder’s work has all of that and more. The moment after tomorrow’s crash. Ryder is a Rodin for the Dystopian age.