Artist Statement - G.S.Lynch

The history of modernist painting has been a constant thematic cornerstone of my painting practice, serving as a content driven segue that facilitates ongoing explorations revolving around the artistic notions of reproduction, intervention and revision. Painted reproductions of canonical art historical imagery often act as entry points for subsequent painterly actions and revisions, which, in tandem with the original image, traverse the spaces between form and content, aesthetics and politics, discourse and critique. The favoring of paint over technology in such reproductive endeavors at once acts as a reaffirmation of the critical potential of painting as a medium, while reopening a dialogue concerning the role of contemporary painting in an increasingly digital world.

A primary role of my paintings is that of reflection; reflection on what has preceded in the art historical context and on my own process as a painter. The decision to mimetically paint source imagery allows for temporal distance to be created between the original and the reproduction; this paradoxical creation of time is a luxury that is generally negated with the speed of digital technology. The time required to reproduce images in paint allows me to become acquainted with the original material in an intimate manner unattainable through the use of technology. Vancouver artist Damian Moppett once noted in an artist talk that his predilection for hand rendered art objects stemmed from the fact that he felt a deeper understanding of his subject through the slowness of process; like Moppett, I feel that slowness has an innate ability to foster awareness and thus generate understanding. For this reason, regardless of the medium of the original source material, all of my current production is mediated through the use of oil paint, whether on paper, linen or canvas. The scale of the paintings is generally reflective of the size of the original image and thus varies from picture to picture. Likewise, the approach to paint application varies with each new painting and relates to the original source material; this faithfulness to the original is then conflated with a painterly revision, or betrayal.

These betrayals playfully assume forms that contradict the visual language and thematic content of the original; bright colourful rings of hard-edged paint float atop soft, chromatically muted landscapes. Garish pink monoliths of thick impasto paint hover in front of idyllic landscapes, thus breaking the illusion of perspective. Swaths of linear rainbows exaggerate existing pictorial planes while concurrently erasing the painted content beneath their trajectories. The favoring of bright, playful colours serves as a humorous way to disarm the thematic and technical seriousness of the modernist paintings I replicate. These interventions also draw attention to formal relationships between pictorial illusion and support surface, idealization and exaggeration, creation and destruction. Moreover, they set up a deliberate duality of pictorial elements, thus creating an internal conflict that the audience must negotiate upon viewing.

While my revised paintings of other paintings, photographs and drawings are presented to the audience as a means of re-contemplating or even re-contextualizing the original, the original should nonetheless not be taken as inspirational material, but rather simply as an integral and questionable piece of the overarching art historical puzzle. As Daniel Birnbaum wrote, “the origin is nothing without its repetitions.” This statement draws attention to an oddity of many pedagogical relationships: the successor (student) often inherits a knowledge base that enables subsequent critique of the predecessor (teacher). In this respect, it is important to recognize that my work is simultaneously indebted to the very thing that it validates and critiques through replication and revision: the modernist original.

The current challenge for artists is to not only offer an informed commentary of the world surrounding them, but to do this in an original manner. This is arguably becoming more difficult in a post modern milieu, however, it is not clear whether or not this preoccupation with originality is in fact requisite to important cultural production. The reflective quality of my work, which looks back at the history of painting, does not reiterate the currency of originality, but rather the value in revisiting the past as a means of coming to a greater understanding of the current context, the present.