SCOTT LYALL
SCALES
19 October - 17 November
Scott Lyall's solo exhibition Scales was the artist’s first solo exhibition in Ireland, at Green On Red Gallery, Dublin.
Scales consisted of work from 3 recent series : Talents, Dragons ( nanofoil carvings ) and Ordinals, all of which concern intersections in the fields of painting, optical physics, pre-Art icons and the status of technical images.
You could be forgiven for thinking you were returning to Graeco-Roman / Medieval thought and aesthetics – even from the titles - while at the same time feeling transported to the cusp of the newest technologies; the kind of juxtaposition or “ poetic engineering “ * worthy of a Platonic post-conceptualist. Lyall’s Talent paintings, for example, have been described as dreamy abstractions, slow-moving films or film stills, such is the triggering effect found in the first and subsequent encounters with these “ painting-mirror-objects “ that at once hold and obscure the viewing subject.
Writing in the May review of Frieze New York 2023, J. Scott Orr explains how the “ awakening effect is enhanced as the differences between the works in the series become apparent, like looking at the individual frames of a movie before seeing the whole. Each Talent is made up of two sheets of glass, one a mirror, the other a blank sheet printed on the inside with a software-generated progression of coloured pixels. The pieces are then cropped by the artist, which Lyall describes as a “cut into the infinite” that scales the work. The work is completed by the addition, by hand, of gel medium and nanoparticles of gold “ on its gently sanded glass surface. ( Scott J. Orr : https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/at-frieze-new-york-2023/5813 )
Akin to golden backgrounds in Cimabue paintings, the gold creates an effect of groundlessness, the fundamental reality of abstraction itself. Simultaneously reflective and absorbing, the painted Talent oscillates between a world-reflecting image and an adventure of embodiment.
* The Poet Engineers - Or how to deploy an artwork's truth procedure to contemplate its real effects : Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York 2021 is the edition of 250 catalogue for the exhibition including ScottLyall's work at Miguel Abreu Gallery
Lyall previously exhibited at Green On Red Gallery in the Armory Show in New York ( 2023 ) and in the gallery’s Light Falls ( 2015 ) show in Spencer Dock, alongside Liadin Cooke, Marcia Hafif, Mark Joyce, Sofie Loscher and Bridget Riley where the artists showed “ a shared attentiveness to the physical properties and enigmatic effects of light. Paint, plastic, and paper become media of absorption, reflection and refraction, alluding to each artist’s indebtedness to this invisible, intangible energy...Scott Lyall's EVeseries take a single colour pixel and mathematically adjusts it through an algorithm, resulting in large prints that are highly dependent on the lighting conditions in which they are shown. “ ( GOR Press Release, 2015 )
Scott Lyall was born in Toronto in 1964. His recent solo and group exhibitions include Talents and The Poet-Engineers, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2023 and 2021); The Painter’s New Tools (Nahmad Contemporary Art, New York (2022); Callings Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2022); Living in a Lightbulb, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, (2019); Dragons, Campoli Presti Gallery, Paris and London, (2018); and Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, Whitney Museum of American Art (2015). Recent writings have appeared in The Poet-Engineers (Sequence Press, New York, 2022); Michel Parmentier (Transatlantique/ER Publishing, Paris, 2023); and On Kawara (DIA New York, 2017, with a Spanish translation upcoming, 2024). Collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Albright Knox Museum (Buffalo NY) and Fondation Francois Pinault (Paris). Lyall lives in Toronto and New York.
