Peter Lynch: Dissecting the Monochrome

Peter Lynch delights in dissecting the monochrome. His taut canvases jostle space and pause time, revealing and concealing the mechanics within the medium of painting. If the principles of Renaissance illusionism were flattened by Modernism, Lynch probes the depths of the painterly surface with a choice selection of tools: the classical brush, the utilitarian roller, and the artist’s finger. Hung like humble totems, the works necessitate heaps of pigment, applied and subtracted layer-by-layer until the colour satisfies, when the webs of pattern and texture resolve in a suspended stasis. However resonant the titles, such as just as when you were about to finish (2024), Lynch explains they are intentionally “ambiguous, avoiding any direct reference or meaning to the works…creating a wedge between the visual and the linguistic.” In this way, Lynch playfully takes on the mantle of Ad Reinhardt’s “Art is not” aphorisms--elevating the language of aesthetics above all else, in ways that privilege our mutable perceptions. 

Lynch (b. 1971, U.K ) operates among a generation of abstract painters who have forged through the multiple ‘isms’ of the past decades to centrifuge the essential elements of plane, gesture, luminosity, and material into objects of individual thought. These artists are unified, as Laura Hoptman argues, by the atemporality implicit in the time-space compression amplified by hyper-sonic realities of the internet era. 1 Past, present, and future coalesce so that artists can borrow freely and simultaneously to tackle the issues at hand. Lynch affirms: “this history [of painting] is not a development that is particularly linear; instead, I think it is very circular. My work relates back to previous generations in a circular forward-looking process.”

Working in rectangular formats of shifting scales (22.5 x 30.5 x 2cm; 42.7 x 33.5 x 2 cm; 50 x 40 x 2 cm, for example) Lynch interrogates the pre-determined structure of the oft-heralded grid by means of bodily gesture, with rhythmic zips of finger marks seeming to appear in the final stages of the painting’s execution. could not be left to ravaging whims (2020) is a yummy slab of custard (1)  underscoring the manifold propositions inherent in the generative constraint of Lynch’s process. Here, the ridges created by the moving roller are impastoed over, evoking a skin akin to the crackle of dry earth. Replete with asymmetrical cross marks which recede and come to the fore, the work suggests a special depth that embraces the painting’s inherent plasticity. Looking straight-on, the “echo of the substrate”—in Lynch’s words--emerges in the slightest phantom of pink. The edge of the canvas is integral, revealing earlier strokes of lavender and Kelly green (it is said that El Greco used the edges of his canvases to wipe his brushes clean). 

In Peter Lynch’s 2024 “Paintings” exhibition at The Transformation Gallery, London, he centers the black canvas in arrangement of eight works, leaping from Tiffany blue to Safari tan. To allow the chemistry to bloom (2024) features a dense weave of warp and weft that nearly subsumes the gesture. The black pigment absorbs and bounces light. Eking on the edge is a florescent green, creating a halo in an expanded field. Throughout his practice, we appreciate an artist whose methodology deconstructs to reconstruct, yet, Peter Lynch, is very much a painter’s painter—he harnesses the power of the medium to offer viewers a much needed halt.

Pujan Gandhi 2024

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1 Laura Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (New York; The Museum of Modern Art, 2014), p.16.

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