Chris Lyon
Restless, Resilient

Bear with me and imagine two beginnings. The first is mystical, of epic
scale, an agonizing tale where earth and heaven are rent apart. This is not
the story of the saved and fallen. What is torn from physical form and
passes directly to the celestial is tormented by its loss. What becomes
embodied is the first to experience being. Lowly being, maybe, but here and
amazed.

Ignore this legion. Envision a single organism struggling in a marvelous mud.
Perhaps it is a thing that can move or sense light. More importantly, it
can distinguish itself from everything else. This knowing, this glistening
primordial birth is another great divide, the one of self and other.

So we are positioned in Lyon's paintings, under a chromatic sky, over a
luminous soup, witnesses and participants, wanting both to merge and
separate. Each painting is another contest where marks wrestle to both
connect and remain significantly individual. Lyon harnesses the forces that
divide to form conjunctions of color and gesture. Edges first hold light at
bay and then melt under its heat. Chaotic utterance becomes speech, then
accelerates to song or sinks back to sound.

Battles have rules and Lyon knows them. He challenges his innately lyrical
sense of color with agitated, unruly compositions and tethers these to
classical proportion. So he strikes from three points, not to nail the
target, but to keep it forever moving.

Susana V. Jacobson


>CLICK ON LINK'S BELOW TO READ SELECTED ESSAYS:

>LILLY WEI 2007
>GERARD BROWN 2005