Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Friday, November 6, of Scott Lyall's REDS, his seventh one-person exhibition at the gallery. The show is comprised of what appear as six monochrome inkjet paintings along with four small glass works.
Neither math nor feeling—these twin limits introduce a tension that has animated much of Lyall's work. How, in a time when technical images are linked to so many new anxieties, can artworks pass through the void of zero to escape a 'Charybdis' of applied mathematics (a domain underpinning advanced computing that seems to require no human context) and a 'Scylla' of immediate emotional triggering (a domain of aggressively designed techniques that control our identities and social impulses)? The answer might lie with an action-image whose subject is engaged in a permanent struggle to maintain the antinomies between these poles: neither strict algorithmic action, say, nor a wishful return to expressive picturing. Between these options, there could still be room to conceive and deploy a painting analog. REDS are intended to test this subject.
Lyall started with a virtual textile. This was a woven 3D model in the vector space of a wireframe object. As in a Jacquard loom, the warp was drawn as a wave passing over and beneath the weft. This projected a tactile thickness, but the thread-like lines were themselves divided into points laid out to position pixels. Next, a palette of pixel values was built with the help from an AI prompt. The artist directed the machine to sample 'areas in any image in the world that are red, or that somebody perceived as red.' This introduced the broadest possible search through the stock of training images.
Miguel Abreu Gallery