20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY OCTOBER 15-21, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com figural presence she believes was never fully intentional. “I don’t think he was trying to make direct figures, but those shapes were appealing to him,” she says. Some pieces resemble Rorschach tests, others read as mandalas, both looking inward; still others unfold like landscapes, looking outward, populated by recurring vases and floral motifs. “There’s a duality in the overall work,” Payton says. Ray’s pieces “give you an immediate hit of something you’re drawn to,” Payton says, and a decade after he died, she reads that immediacy differently. “They offer something we’re missing: the vibrancy of art, its ability to transform us and take us to another place in our imaginations…If he had lived longer, I think they would have appreciated the way I see them now.” The viewing tour at MMA starts before a single painting comes into view. Much of the framing comes through photographs by Henrik Kam documenting Ray’s apartment and studio exactly as he left them. “You can see where he lived and where he worked,” Payton says. “From that, you can gather the details of his life.” The images reveal a voracious reader—bookshelves crowd nearly every wall—and a collector with an eye trained on his peers: two Warhol cow prints, a Damien Hirst, a Paolo Soleri sculpture, among pieces representing mid-century modern design. Ray’s materials were as layered as his biography—photography, handmade woodblock prints, newsprint, magazine cutouts—drawing on “modernism, Dada, decorative arts, Fluxus, pop art, and zines,” Payton says, without settling into any one of them. He was also an activist and designed graphics for organizations such as Act Up, an early AIDS awareness and advocacy group. Elsewhere the show gets into the physical labor behind the work: papers mid-development, brayers, paintbrushes, small studies and a piece pairing two images of David Bowie, with whom Ray collaborated for years. The gallery’s largest work, a sprawling “Wall of Sound,” anchors dozens and dozens of his exercises or studies on paper, a documentation of his process. It arrived at the museum in a box from Williams’ archive, one of several such finds. The studies catch Ray mid-process: a balloon-like form full of air, and passages of black, exploding shapes Payton compares to speech bubbles. “I think they relate to the expression of language and words, with that same dynamism,” she says. It’s an observation that extends into the studies’ evident debt to music. Ray was an avid listener, and the smaller cut-up studies recall the collage techniques Brian Eno and David Bowie used in their own recording process. “They’re cut-ups—many pieces of music and putting them together,” Payton says. “They connect back to music. They’re meant to resonate like sound.” Not everything in the show is at monumental scale. A run of resin-surfaced panels, installed together as a single sculptural unit, could just as easily stand alone, Payton says: “I think Rex would have welcomed seeing them as one full unit, but they can also be seen as individual works.” Nearby sit the editions—prints released in runs of 25, flatter and more affordable than the layered originals, offering collectors of more modest means a way in. Ray’s originals moved through private collections and institutions alike (SFMOMA holds several), but Payton pushes back gently on any hierarchy that would dismiss the work, editions included, as merely decorative. “If you make work and it’s sold to people, it’s going to be decorative,” she says. “I don’t think that’s antithetical to COURTESY OF GALLERY 16 DANIEL DREIFUSS The posters by Rex Ray made for 1960s and 1970s live music concerts, club dates and legendary events are highly collectible. The signature bright colors and geometric yet organic shapes appear in Ray’s work, including in “Scylla,” which is painted and cut paper on oil on linen. “He used scissors like making light.”
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