Brendan Lynch at Rodolphe Janssen

Artist: Brendan Lynch

Exhibition title: Entrance Stone

Venue: Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium

Date: May 25 – July 17, 2015

Photography: Hugard & Vanoverschelde photography, images courtesy of the artist and Rodolphe Janssen

“Sometimes the path threatens to get lost in a sea of ferns or thorny bushes, but as long as I push on ahead the pseudo-path pops up again. The forest doesn’t scare me anymore. It has its own rules and patterns, and once you stop being afraid you’re aware of them. Once I grasp these repetitions, I make them a part of me.”

– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore –

In his multimedia installation, Entrance Stone, Brendan Lynch further explores his relationship with the instructional painting videos of Bob Ross. Ross, who rose to prominence in the 1980’s for his public access television program, The Joy of Painting, is still widely recognized for his charmingly picturesque landscapes. After several years of employing Ross’s methodical style of painting, Lynch deftly manipulates the repetitions, colors, and patterns of its techniques as a guide for creating his own original dreamscapes. Unlike Ross’s neatly resolved compositions, Lynch’s works exist in the tenuous space between incompletion and completion, suspended in a perpetual state of coalescing.

Working within the constraints of Ross’ vernacular, and drawing inspiration from minimal ambient composers such as Harold Budd and William Basinski, Lynch develops sparse and meditative landscapes that emphasize the subtleties within his process. Similar to Basinski’s degenerative tape loops, Lynch’s work references the beauty of being lost in a moment with quiet hints of time passing.

In conjunction with the paintings, Lynch and his brother, Thomas Lynch III, have collaborated on an immersive mural on an adjoining wall. Responding to his brother’s underlying imagery, Lynch has distorted the space with painted gestures that merge wall and landscape. Lynch’s method is one of reduction, a stride toward censoring the recognizable into nothingness. The white paint clashes with the landscape as if to impede its completion, redirecting the subject toward something inexplicable, a new possibility.

Lynch has also included a selection of 38 vinyl records from his personal collection of ambient and minimal composers. Each day, a new record will be played for the duration of the exhibition, creating a transient atmosphere, a shifting environment from day to day. Designing this continuum for experience, Lynch embraces the potential and malleability of the individual moment, allowing it to occur and reoccur for instances of curious discovery.

Brendan Lynch (born 1985, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Mountains Collection at Howard St and UNTITLED (New York), Inside the White cube at White Cube (London), @harleynewton at Galerie Bugada & Cargnel (Paris) and Art in General Presents: Brendan Lynch + Naomi Larbi at +1 in New York City. He has recently participated in group exhibitions at Zabludowicz Collection (London) and the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle). Lynch is also a member of the Still House Group.