TALISMÃ

A Prophecy of Color by Maria Lynch

The artist works with pure colours, playing on the juxtapositions of colored areas with warm and cool colours, creating a contrast that results in striking compositions. The drawing, which sometimes appears as it is on the white, bare background, is only a means to justify the harmony between the lines. The colour, in turn, is a means of highlighting the drawing. Background and subject, performed on the same plane, draw attention and invite a three-dimensional journey. Maria Lynch takes us to the rhythm of resonances that want to modify the spectator's psychic states, with a very particular ability, because she does it with a great economy of means. In the exhibition presented at Baró gallery, which contains her works from 2018 and 2019, the human figures have disappeared. The viewer does not possess the certainty to recognize the forms, the abstract objects float in an indeterminate space. We are close to something identifiable, but never really find a key. This last series invokes Paul Sérusier's masterpiece and reference painting "Talisman," which he painted in the Bois d'Amour in Pont-Aven in 1888 under Gauguin's supervision.

Although Maria Lynch paints and plays with a wide palette of different artistic approaches, she has perfectly understood the lesson and knows how to handle her pure colors. Her work is an ode to the painting of generations who often thought that everything had been said on the subject. To continue with "Talisman," on Gauguin's advice, the young Sérusier was invited to paint what he felt rather than what he saw, to go to the mystery of the center of thought. Like him, Maria Lynch presents a work that is not entirely liberated from representation, but that sublimes it.

Her landscapes are singular. Neither heroic nor bucolic. A picturesque landscape that probes the geological layers, highlights the horizon in the manner of children's drawings until it is drowned; until it confuses high and low, horizontal and vertical, earth and flesh, nature and its creatures. One can read the works as a chromatic explosion of a life, but also as the illustration of the calm memory of a childhood place. It also expresses a need for abstraction in a world that is increasingly confused.

A talisman is an object that has enshrined signs, to which virtues of protection and power are attributed. For some, the talisman maintains its strength from the images it carries. Astrological forces, invocations and incantations in a whirlwind of colors and images to interpret, this new series of works by Maria Lynch is a fertile ground of reflection for the viewer.

Marc Pottier

TALISMÃ: MARIA LYNCH I CURATED BY MARC POTTIER