Stills: Recent Painting by Phillip Lynam

Lynam's new work seeks to explore the potential for a two-dimensional artwork to create an immersive, dislocating experience. The artist describes his most powerful personal experience with artwork as the moment at which the viewer slows down, has effectively blocked out the rest of the room and any other distractions, the moment that one is not simply looking at the surface of a painting, but is looking into the work – completely immersed in the artwork itself. This experience is not dissimilar to the way one might interact with television screens or computer monitors. The physical reality of these screens seems to drop away as one becomes more focused on the image(s) they display, and forget about them as objects and instead look at the content that seems to exist behind the screens. A painting is an object, just as a television is, but it is also, at the same time, something immaterial, an image, like a projection on a screen. It is simultaneously real and false; present and absent. In his work Lynam tries to emphasize elements of the paintings that create this sort of immersive experience — vivid, glowing color, a sense of internal illumination, and complex layering of marks, patterns, and fragments of images that allude to space behind the physical surface of the work.