NOUS DANS L’OUBLI DE NOS MÉTAMORPHOSES
Outlines gouge through the mire of paint. The drawing is born by opening up veins through the thick layer of color – it is hard, struggling against the thick matter; you could almost say there are no brushstrokes, but grooves; in others, more and more avalanches come out of the tubes. Yet this furrowed surface in no way occludes the peculiar sensibility that shines out. This deceptiveness points to something that underpins all the works: the omnipresence of metamorphosis.
These paintings are capable of bringing on a temperate orgy. To put it another way, their effusion is counterbalanced by a subtle, measured control – the colors are vibrant yet contained in the interaction between flat planes and others that give access to the deeper layers on the canvas, shimmering, further down. There is something noteworthy in the way they are somehow “hard” and oddly hypnotic, voluminous and dense, reverberating the multiple extracts that bind them together. This is also a pictorial exploration, drawing as it does on colors that harbor another dilemma, that of being so very “post-modern” (coming from a different visual experience, born from the coexistence of painting, television, computers, advertising, industry and cities – the world, then), and are built around a singular palette. Take the different blues used on the canvases: they have substance and are especially compact, occasionally giving the forms an almost sculptural spatiality.
Maria Lynch’s paintings seem to portray a simple iconography: a figure on the canvas that gradually turns into another, planes bordering different areas, a single toadstool set against a plain background. All these images correspond to the sense of presage incorporated by the artist. Yet there is an unexpected aspect to this rutted drawing, because in the background and especially on the surface it retains an intensity that derives from this initial friction exposed in the furrows made by the brush. The drawing is born with the painting: both are contiguous, overlapping. They are paintings-cum-drawings in process that take part willingly in the narratives they tell and take mutability as their driving force, their lynchpin. The images are a stage in and a double for something that permeates everything materialized in the works; they are metalinguistic and metonymic. These are paintings whose end is also always a new beginning, a solar, serene, obsession capable of constantly asking whether what they found, rather than finishing the work, might not be a premise for something new that will carry it on, adding meanings to each new internal connection. Ultimately, an energy whose raison d’être is at each and every moment to become someone else (bringing to mind Rimbaud’s famous phrase, je est un autre), paintings that make themselves by constantly activating the rediscovery of how they came into being.
Guilherme Bueno