Maria Lynch

Maria Lynch

 

Maria Lynch’s work comprises a number of art forms, such as painting, drawing and sculpture, which are seemingly associated to a practice that develops through canonic formal and chromatic solutions. The surface of the support, in the context of her painting and drawing, is a two-dimensional plane of a self-referential universe, sometimes akin to a sort of biographic visual writing, which appears to manifest a certain restlessness and compulsion in the act of creation: drawing and painting. That compulsion is not the result of a process that is excessive in terms of the quantity of work produced; its excess is found in the plastic and visual qualities that the artist pursues in an approach marked by a diaristic metric, as if each exhibition was a chapter in a journal that began long ago, and which we will never know for sure when, or if, it will be interrupted. Maria Lynch’s drawings are very important to our understanding of her work, regardless of whatever exhibition of hers we have before us, featuring paintings, sculptures or drawings from any given point of her career. They are a sort of statement of the memory of her hand, and thus of her emotional and referential universe. One of the essential features of Maria Lynch’s work is, I think, a pathos that inscribes into her pieces a poetical stimulus for the viewer, be that person a visitor of one of her exhibitions, or simply someone looking at one of her works, in her studio or elsewhere. That often occurs in her austere drawings, their clear lines connecting and reconnecting certain shapes that appear to float on or sink into the surface of paper. In this succession of (sometimes near-invisible) micro-events, the viewer’s time plays a crucial role in the enjoyment of her work: both in her paintings and her drawings, the artist carries out a process of revelation and concealment that materialises itself in organic, sometimes even visceral ways. In this exhibition, titled “Submersos” [Submerged], Maria Lynch presents a new series of paintings and drawings. The paintings, in large and medium formats, are like black screens that reveal and simultaneously conceal invented forms that are evocative of images and fragments of cities, or structural elements wrought with a very frugal and balanced chromatic palette.” - curated by João Silvério