MARIA LYNCH: TIME IS NEITHER PAST OR PRESENT

September 18 – October 5, 2014

Spazio522

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).

Time Is Neither Past Nor Present challenges 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.

The exhibition Time Is Neither Past Nor Present is open by appointment (ph: +1 347-3934911) from September 18 to October 5, 2014 at Spazio 522, 526 W 26th Street – Suite 522, Chelsea, New York.