Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Friday, November 6, of Scott Lyall’s REDS, his seventh one-person exhibition at the gallery. The show is comprised of what appear as six monochrome inkjet paintings along with four small glass works.
Neither math nor feeling–these twin limits introduce a tension that has animated much of Lyall’s work. How, in a time when technical images are linked to so many new anxieties, can artworks pass through the void of zero to escape a ‘Charybdis’ of applied mathematics (a domain underpinning advanced computing that seems to require no human context) and a ‘Scylla’ of immediate emotional triggering (a domain of aggressively designed techniques that control our identities and social impulses)? The answer might lie with an action-image whose subject is engaged in a permanent struggle to maintain the antinomies between these poles: neither strict algorithmic action, say, nor a wishful return to expressive picturing. Between these options, there could still be room to conceive and deploy a painting analog. REDS are intended to test this subject.
Lyall started with a virtual textile.