Alan Lynch. Infinitely on the surfaces of this teardrop world

About

Alan Lynch (b. 1926, d. 1994) was a painter whose output in oil and watercolor made overtures to worlds of both natural and metaphysical order. He was an earnest scholar of broad artistic traditions and his pursuit of devotional and philosophical systems colored the pace with which he lived life and executed artworks.

While Lynch was a lively and influential contributor to the vast matrix of post-war art in California, he maintained an idiosyncratic position amongst his peers. In 1969, following a bright—if brief—exhibition career lasting just over a decade, he decisively withdrew from publicly presenting his paintings in favor of cultivating a private practice. This marked shift would remain in place for the remaining two and a half decades of his life. When Lynch passed away in 1994, the lion’s share of his oeuvre remained unexhibited.

Infinitely on the surfaces of this teardrop world comprises two major bodies of work by the artist, each from crucial junctures: oil paintings made from 1963 to 1965; and watercolors from 1975 to 1977. Many of these examples are on loan from private collections and together they comprise the most comprehensive staging of the artist’s work to date.

Lynch’s work speaks to the drama of sensation in numerous keys. His oil paintings are both tightly-wound and lyrically-expressive, planar fields of color carved into floating floral foams. At the time of their execution, these works mapped the visual grammar of hard-edge painting onto the natural world—formalism found in rocks, flowers and fruits. Lynch’s Dilexi-era oil paintings established an intense and singular engagement with interactions available to a restricted color palette, a concern that would remain with him for the decades to follow. These early and seminal paintings on view here have not been publicly presented since their respective debuts in the 1960s.

Lynch’s pivot from exhibition after that decade was accompanied by a shift in working method and medium. His “metaphysical sabbatical” from exhibiting afforded him the ability to abandon a fixed studio in favor of travel, both to far flung cities and monastic centers alike. With him came painting, albeit in a new form: Lynch began working almost exclusively on paper, predominantly in watercolors and occasionally drawing sinewy line out of black ink. The closeness of a page was privileged by Lynch for the remainder of his life as this sensual and diminutive format offered a foil to his deepening engagement with to the slow drum of Zazen—sitting meditation.

Within the exhibition, three years of his work in this format are foregrounded: 1975 to 1977, a particularly charged period in which Lynch’s images began more steadily arching towards the representational. At first, his passages gestured strictly to the suggestive and biomorphic; later, those same mounds were set against a horizon, suddenly evoking landscape and mental vistas. While he rarely changed paper type and never changed scale, there remained in him a restless spirit of exploration and he managed to advance the medium through its own life cycle, from earlier zygotic forms to fully-fledged botanical views in his final years. These works would never disimbricate from Lynch’s private and devotional practices and the examples shown here have not been exhibited publicly.

Irrespective of format, Lynch conjured a deeply sensitive tether to the natural word, managing to pursuit its essence through deeply formal explorations of color, line and planarity. Jack Hirschman—a landmark poet and essayist of the 20th century—would call this sensitivity to the fore in a poem written in Lynch’s honor, titled “A Pebble Skipping.” This exhibition borrows its title from Hirschman’s deft language, reproduced below in full:

Came to the river of mist
which caught the sun, a lemon fish
that cleared the river.
there is no palette like a river.
with it he is a brush floating,
a brush standing up
a brush stroking the void
in a tao of the down of wild ducks bristling,
the thin beard of snow on the mountain,
his finger tamping the sun
into the crate of his pipe,
a meditation stretching way away,
and the rest…
a pebble skipping
infinitely on the surfaces of this teardrop world

Alan Lynch was born in San Francisco in 1926 and died in the same city in 1994, having lived at various times in Los Angeles, Paris, Mexico City, North Carolina and various regions of Japan. Before he began exhibiting his work, Lynch received an MFA from Mexico City College and an MA in Art History from UCLA. While Lynch’s public exhibition history spanned just over a decade, during this time the artist’s work was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pasadena Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Crocker Art Museum, Ferus Gallery and Dilexi Gallery. He continued to work prolifically in private for nearly 25 years after withdrawing from conventional exhibition formats.

Infinitely on the surfaces of this teardrop world will be accompanied by the first catalogue dedicated to the artist, comprising works in the exhibition alongside archival materials and an essay by curator and art historian Laura Whitcomb. Additional to this catalogue will be a supplemental, expository text on the exhibition by Harrison Glazier.