Artist
Lincoln Townley
@lincolntownley
Artist
Part of events on ArtRabbit in: London, New York
Lincoln Townley is an extremely prolific painter. Lincoln’s paintings are a provocation, a visceral journey into the dark energy of the unconscious mind. This is painting at its most authentic, ripping to shreds the very idea of art as a mute, sanitized representation of reality. Lincoln’s work is a compulsion to feel the raw, disturbance that howls in the heart of the human condition. His work shows minds and bodies gripped by a hunger that overwhelms them as they break apart into tortured fragments, or split open to lay bare the demons buried deep inside. If sanity is the ability to hold these demons at bay, to build a dam strong enough to hold back the hellish tsunami of the unconscious, these are paintings that defy the possibility of repression. Eyes, heads, shoulders, teeth, vertiginous swirls of colour, all slice through the veneer of civilization, and we stand exposed before a familiar and terrifying madness. It is the familiarity of this madness that draws us into it. It is no longer something we can stand at a distance from. We can’t make this madness the preserve of the lost, the lonely, the addicted, and the insane, those outcasts exiled to the edges, who live on the margins and feed off the scraps of the civilized world. This madness is our madness. It’s what we repress and deny until we come face to face with ourselves and we are driven to a terrifying honesty.
