Scott Lyall: οἴνοπα πόντον
10 April – 24 May 2014
Campoli Presti, London
Campoli Presti is pleased to present Scott Lyall’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery that comprises a new series of printed works on laminated glass and printed canvases, combining similar production techniques yet manifesting different formal outcomes.
The exhibition takes its title from the Ancient Greek Expression οἴνοπα πόντον whose translation ‘wine
dark sea’ has been debated by scholars and treated as a poetic mystery, referring to colour’s inherent
phenomenological and linguistically determined character.
Lyall’s large ink paintings arise from one isolated digital pixel, whose colour information is directly sent to
print heads bypassing the mediation of pre-existing images. In the series Black Glass (2014) each work
consists of two panes of museum glass laminated together – the laminating material itself being infused
with ink. Colour is suspended directly in the glass, then the outer faces are printed, sealing the work and
darkening it. These graphic assemblages of colour data – ‘non-images’ in a certain way – form visual
atmospheres that shift depending on different viewpoints, inscribing within the process an actual
experience of ‘colour’.
οἴνοπα πόντον meditates on the tensions that exist between the assertion of relativity and the standardisation of colour experience by industrial colour models. Digital information is translated, transformed and materialised producing visual equivalents of ‘nothingness’ – opening up not to an ‘endgame’ or an image of the ‘last painting’, but to an initial ground. The works complicate the digital circulation and consumption of images, inviting a multiplicity of readings – naked exposure to, relief in, perpetuation of – the aleatory.
Scott Lyall lives and works in Toronto and New York. He has held a solo institutional exhibition at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2008 with an accompanying catalogue. Past exhibitions include Miguel Abreu
Gallery, New York; Campoli Presti, London; Campoli Presti, Paris; Galerie Christian Nagel, Antwerp; the Montreal Biennial and the 7th Santa Fe Biennial.
