Scott Lyall exhbition: Nudes 3

Campoli Presti is pleased to present nudes  3 by Scott Lyall. This will be the artist’s second solo show in London, and his fourth exhibition with the gallery.

Lyall’s title, nudes , can be interpreted as a charm. (Charme in French: incantation, intonation; a key search.) But the title is also given as an image under erasure, according to a formula that recurs in written thought: ‘since a word is inaccurate, it must be crossed out. Since some word is necessary, the chosen word remains legible.’ (Heidegger). The nudes are graphic assemblages combining ink and its erasure in multiple passes of canvas through a UV-based printer. Lyall’s procedure sequences ink in sheer layers of application so that the gradient color-deposits are mixed directly onto the field. There is no graphic image that pre- exists this on a screen because the color information is sent directly to the print heads. At stake is a movement from pure quantity to the figure without the mediation of an ‘image’ from the regime of graphic design. Each nude becomes an expression of almost negative saturation, undecidable between the veiling and laying bare of what is seen.

An interesting occurrence apropos of the UV printer is that each nude attains a warm and very subtle residual tan. (This effect is the result of long exposures from multiple passes.) There is therefore an index of rays ‘beyond color’ that affect the tonal assemblage by subtly calibrating the whole. You would think that UV exposure would only bleach these sheets of color. But in fact it works to fix them. It sears them in and cures the tone. The result is neither perception, pure and simple, nor an image. Lyall sees these special effects as the nude’s emergent quality, a kind of sacrifice of abstraction and mechano-graphic (conceptual) thought.

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‘Paul Valéry spent his mornings writing thoughts about mathematics. He said he earned the right to be stupid –intuitive, moved—the rest of the day. I will say: the difference between mathematics and emotion, between an empty symbolic quantity and a meaningful plastic art– between a figure in circulation and the self who must have summoned it— is discharge, sprays of fog, the sublimation of ink itself.’ (-S. Lyall)