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Chris Lyon - THE WIDENING GYRE Some artists rely on their fantasies, on racing dreams and the lilting stream of the unconscious, sifting them for tantalizing and taunting images, tumbling, in their search down into the abyss or soaring up over the rainbow. The painter Chris Lyon is one of them. In his ambitiously scaled, deceptively blissful, blissed-out, dirty pink and heavenly blue paintings, chaos is the norm-although it is an ordered mayhem. Lyon seeks the high point, the soundless Munch scream as he obsessively, meticulously adjusts his visionary haul-with echoes of Matthew Ritchie's cosmological epics-spinning it into a painting. While they are abstract in their dense, allover interlaced patternings, small grotesque and glamorous figures-faces, arms, legs, torsos-emerge upon closer inspection, twisting and turning as if struggling to free themselves from the web they are caught in. They are an allegory, perhaps, of figuration's struggle through much of the 20th century to liberate itself from the annihilating embrace of modernist formalism to attain its present state of co-existence with its former adversary as a more than equal partner in painting's larger syntax. Lyon's slyly rendered figures are the modules that create his abstract loops and he carefully calibrates their visibility so that his paintings teeter on the cusp of abstraction and the representational. His insouciant, clear blues are juxtaposed with a range of pinks, from the flirtatious to the color of raw, wounded flesh, the bright grounds for Lyon's transmogrified filigrees of knotted muscle, sinews and bones, a nervy, wired system of sensation. Lyon sings the (deconstructed) body electric. Titles like Akido's Cupid, The Bitch is ON, Anarchy of the Old Ice Rink and Burnt by the Sirens of the Sun remixes the mythic with attitude and vibrant flux, twisting things 270 degrees (the title of the show) toward infinity. Lilly Wei Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic
who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor at
ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.
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