The paintings in the Gavin Lynch’s latest exhibition, Rural Days, continue to act as stages for the artist to experiment with the conventions of the landscape genre. Using both a hard edge and collage approach, Lynch culls, crops and paints a variety of source images on the picture plane, using his own archive of landscape photography, previous paintings and stock imagery to create aggregate motifs that accentuate the material and tactile potential of paint.
Lynch’s painterly vernacular of hard edge trees, fluid lakes and pixelated vegetation both simulates the visual complexity of our experiences in nature and recalls our relationship to the digital realm. For Lynch, nature is often processed via the lens of the digital screen, with his painterly approach mirroring the functionality of photo editing software: specific trees are seemingly cut and paste into new locations, terra firma concedes to pixelation and entire motifs are dragged and dropped into new scenarios.
Produced in a rural Quebec schoolhouse-turned-art-coop, Rural Days is the product of an artist relating to both the solitary act of painting and his surroundings. The paintings of both real and imagined spaces act as contemplative windows through which we can regard our changing relationship to nature.
