I recently made the acquaintance of a young painter, originally from Minnesota, named David Lynn. He was kind enough to send me images of some recent works (most of which were shown a few months ago at The Minnesota Museum of American Art I believe) and, in that they aren’t anywhere else to be seen on this ol’ internet, I wanted to share them you. See below for a few words and more than a few paintings.
Though he’s produced a huge amount of work, much of it landscapes from his wide travels, in general David’s previously exhibited pieces have dealt with a kind of aesthetic subversion, playing with the balance between each picture’s pleasant surface and its darker underbelly. Most of the paintings which immediately precede the group I’m showing here are very colorful and layered. On first glance they might be thought of as “pretty” containing as they do birds, elements of landscape, etc. But a closer inspection will readily yield symbols of a political system gone awry and what David refers to as “religious warfare.” If I remember correctly, from our brief conversation, some of the pieces go so far as to subvert their own content over time, with reactive surfaces that eventually have those “pretty” birds falling out of the sky.
As you all know by now I’m most interested in a pictures aesthetic payload, much more so, in the final reckoning, than the underlying concept. So “subversion” and “tension” aside let me say much of the work was in quite nice. The new work though, for me, is something else all together. Less obviously beautiful but more compelling. He’s a young artist, only having graduated Parsons in 2001, but this new group, created as it was both under emotional difficulty as well as material limitations, seems to me a step toward something much better.
As David put’s it:
“These particular paintings differ greatly from the work I have done in the past. I began them when my mother broke her neck at c5 and c6 earlier this year and I moved back to Minnesota from New York to help take care of her. Leaving much of my materials and studio behind me I did not expect to make much work, let alone head-off in an entirely new direction. Art making itself seemed to have fallen a bit flat for me, the particular forms and images I had been previously engaged with seeming to have little or no relevance suddenly.
This work represents a bit of a departure for me especially in terms of materials. Much of my past work is very technique-heavy, utilizing a wide range of materials. These new pieces are much more pared-down using just a few types of ink and some black and white paint. They developed in a very organic way as well, with much less planning than most of the pictures I have made in the past.
For me they are meditative, composed with meticulous gestures leading to unstable and dangerous looking structures. There is a feeling here of something tumultuous happening, or about to happen, though they maintain a kind of almost static distance as well, with the space often flattened completely. From my point of view they are a stark depiction of the frailty and fragility of life both on a personal as well as in a larger sense. There are, of course, many different ways that one could interpret them.”
One last note as to scale: The dimensions of these particular paintings range from forty inches to over six feet.
Hope you enjoyed, and hope to see more from David in the future.
