Time Is Neither Past Nor Present

Does time exist? What is time? Can we be sure that our idea of time corresponds to the definition of a physical quantity? Is it a physical quantity, or a dimension, or is it rather a conceptual idea within a structure of other concepts?

Those, and many other questions, have been matters of debate among scientists and philosophers since the ancient Greeks who have tried to understand and define time. Modern philosophers, such as Newton, Kant, and Leibniz, give more than one definition of time, and we can agree on the fact that it is connected to space and events. However, the subject has not been investigated within the production of an artwork, where time is a fundamental element.

Inspired by those questions, Time Is Neither Past Nor Present will show a single painting installation by Brazilian artist Maria Lynch. Her work—made of two large-scale canvases that hang from the ceiling of two adjacent walls and cross on the floor—questions the existence of a work of art without limits of time and space. There is no canvas, no frame, no premeditated dimension. The painting process and the work itself can be compared to both the annulment of time and its expansion within it. It represents "an element of a systematic mental framework that necessarily structures the experience of any rational agent or observing subject" (Emanuel Kant on the definition of Time).

‘I think my painting is in this suspension of time and space. It’s this wonderland space where everything is possible and curved. Unconscious imagination and intense chromatic colors, like a landscape, organic and everyday urban objects, all compressed and combined’, says the artist Maria Lynch. ‘It’s a fabulous aggregation of reality and fiction in a non-linear narrative. The events are glimpses of impossible situations where everything is curbed, round, tactile. A world where things intertwine, merge, swallow each other and are spilled by each other. It’s a universe of unusual and amorphous entities’.

Time Is Neither Past Nor Present challenges thus the limits of surface, space, and our habitual idea of painting, representing a distinct evolution in Lynch’s research of abstraction and the display of excess in all its forms.

Fo more information:
Open by appointment from September 18 to October 5, 2014
Spazio 522, 526 W 26th Street – Suite 522
Chelsea, New York
www.sarahcrown.com
www.spazio522.com