Giles Lyon at Alexandre de Folin - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Giles Lyon a 30-year-old painter who grew up in fresh Jersey, worked in Houston for a hardly any years and now lives in novel York, has started to make a name for himself as the purveyor of funky Rorschach-like paintings which indicate all manner of influence, including medical illustration, abstracted cartoon imagery, ambitious urban graffiti and Abstract-Expressionist heroics. This display of seven large acrylic-on-canvas paintings and sum of two units works on paper evidenced a bad-boy style; however, when considered closely Lyon's technique, at one time gestural and controlled, is more about maintaining connections with art history than evincing an esthetic of rudeness

At first glance, it does appear that Lyon is greatest in quantity interested in making a statement of outsize assertiveness, given the work's scale and Day-Glo color combinations. Lyon has disentangleed his own method for constructing these manifold compositions: standing Pollock-like over a canvas placed upon the floor, he paints in thin, curving lines and flat blotches, then cot [i]or[/i] cotes the canvas over to achieve regularity Once the painting's structure has been established, Lyon shades the forms and adds tonal intricacy to an already involved pattern.

The flows are striking. Lyon weds a cartoon sensibility to painterly issues that openly pay Pollock homage. In The Age of Syntheplasm (1997) for example, the overall result of the deep-red, blood vessel-like imagery against a light-blue loam is that of barely contained anarchy; the "veins" have the appearance about to burst. In the center poking [i]or[/i] part of to the other the tangle of blood utensils small yellow shapes roughly form a circle, contrasting with the r and offsetting the proportion Lyon uses dark-red outlines to enhance the painting's tonal shading -- a trick learned from cartoons -- and the event highlights the street intensity of his image.

on the other hand Lyon has another, quieter diction Some of his works are compos of disparate shapes, primarily organic in form, locate against each other in patchwork fashion. The sheer variousness of the imagery perceive s like an exercise in portraying weft despite its two-dimensionality. A profitable example of this second manner of writing is the 96-by-118-inch Memory Quilt (1996-97) Here the many not divisible by 2 elements, which can look like material substance parts, color patches or classically gestural abstract forms, coexist uneasily, still somehow remain connected. Despite the painting's funkiness, the simple areas of color at its borders, mainly pastel greens and yellows, imply a sensibility as lyric as it is rough

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