Rob Lyon. Temenos

About

Temenos takes its title from a painting in the show and resonates with wider themes in this body of new work. In Greek mythology temenos refers to a sacred demarcation of land, which can be formally linked to the shapes in Lyon's paintings. In psychology temenos speaks to when the unconscious comes into light of consciousness, transpiring through dreams and drawing. This links to the paintings' explorative and transformative nature. In a series of 'Spring' paintings Lyon takes the viewer through an abstract life cycle - the five works suggest key moments from birth to death and rebirth.

Expanding on Paul Nash's concept of 'genius loci' - the spirit of place - Lyon considers how we as visitors activate the landscape and how the landscape activates us. Walking, looking, and recalling this 'activation' are key to the process of making each painting. Pockets of light and airy space evoke an absence, omission, or clearing - Lyon has come to see these spaces as representations of portals that combine as a measure of consecrated land, giving form to the notion that the landscape is a temple of sorts. He meditates on energy states of grief, loss, joy and ecstasy in connection to these portals in the landscape, through which we are 'transformed but continuous, elusive, reverberating echoes, a reversible reaction between becoming and ceasing, in a perpetual state of resonance.' (Lyon, 2023)