www.montereycountynow.com OCTOBER 15-21, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 come from private collections. Their history goes back much further than this show: Payton mounted Ray’s first-ever museum exhibition while she was director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. That exhibit in 2009 featured a single piece roughly 120 feet long that can still be found documented online. After Ray’s death in 2015, she helped place his archive with institutions that could keep it public: UC Berkeley, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Kirkland Museum, now part of the Denver Art Museum. “They’re different bodies of work, but I’m trying to ensure his legacy endures,” she says. Bringing this show to Monterey instead of San Francisco was a deliberate choice. “I’m interested in showing the work in an environment where it hasn’t been seen before,” Payton explains. “In San Francisco he’s well known, and it would have had a tremendous reception.” But MMA offered something a hometown crowd couldn’t: an audience meeting Ray’s work for the first time. Rex Ray started in graphic design before enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1980s, though Payton resists the idea that fine art came second. “He was a successful artist from the start, in the sense that he had his own ideas,” she says. “Making a living, which is what success implies, came through the graphic work first and then the artwork. But those two probably arrived at the same time in his career.” In the main gallery, that vocabulary plays out at scale. Most of the work is quite large, at 5-by-6 feet. Ray’s work “Placidium,” capturing the essence of his own visual folklore, is a large 4.5-by-4.5-foot square. It shows the garden of his favorite forms, ethereal and plant-like that tend to bloom in their abstract vases, festive like peacock feathers. The same shapes recur across canvases, deployed differently each time, built from thousands of individually hand-printed, hand-painted or hand-manipulated pieces of paper glued together. “He used scissors like making light,” Payton says. “He was always cutting things up and building a cache of shapes to work from.” The compositions read as intuitive rather than planned—“you can judge which came first just by the layering,” Payton notes—and nearly all of them sit on a background rendered in a faux wood-panel texture, a detail Payton reads as both a joke and a clue. “A little kitschy, a little ’70s suburbia,” she calls it, tracing it to Ray’s childhood in a Colorado Springs subdivision, the kind of repetitive tract housing the photographer Robert Adams once made famous. She also wonders, without ever having asked Ray directly, whether the motif carries an echo of German marquetry, the wood-inlay tradition his birth country helped perfect. “Rex and I never talked about this, but there may be some influence in how marquetry assembles wood from different parts into a whole,” she notes. Formally, Payton places the work in the territory of “post-abstraction”— organic rather than geometric, with a COURTESY OF GALLERY 16 DANIEL DREIFUSS The scale of Ray’s work is one engaging element of the exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art. The Platismatia series, above, consists of three fine art pigment prints created in 2014. “Wrapt” from 2004 is a pigment print on Hahnemühle fine art paper.
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