Scott Lyall exhbition: A Moveable Feast - Part X

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce the tenth part of A Moveable Feast with a solo presentation by ScottLyall. The exhibition is comprised of new works on laminated glass and printed canvases. The exhibitioncontinues Lyall’s research on the status of digital colour as a code that is constantly translated, transformed,and materialized; continually delaying or deferring its meaning.

The printing technique used for these works extends this act of translation as it turns information directlyinto colour. The canvases are produced by combining ink and its erasure, in multiple passes, through a UV-based printer. Lyall’s procedure sequences ink in sheer layers of application so that the gradient colour-deposits are mixed directly onto the field. Since the colour information is sent directly to the print headsthere is no graphic image that pre-exists this on a screen. The colors are completely written out ofquantities.

Following a similar procedure, Lyall’s glass works consist of two panes of museum glass printed on both thefront and rear surfaces. Ink is also infused between the glass sheets and into the laminate, making colourthe bonding component of the work – not its mere surface but literally its content. The non- contrasting,non-colored surface suggest Ad Reinhardt’s conception of black as the absence of color.

Offering neither a promise nor a threat digital shares the interpretive ambiguity of the term /pharmakon/ asunderstood by Jacques Derrida. Lyall’s colors, in turn, are a treatment, a poisoning or a cure, an elixir, acharm, a spell, a powder or a pigment, make up, ink and colored paint. They are something with no stableessence, no proper characteristics nor any necessary material manifestation; therefore these marks existonly as a trace. In Lyall’s works, color does not reflect its surroundings but points to a view at the depth ofthe horizon. It’s the color of the compression of light, and at the same time, par excellence, the color of acompressed digital file.