NEW YORK, NY.- Lyons Wier Gallery presents Everyone’s A Critic, a new body of work by artist David Lyle. Working from found vintage and vernacular photographs, Lyle seamlessly composes works that harken back to 1950’s and 1960’s America – not as they were, but skewed and reimagined by the artist.
Lyle’s painstakingly reductive painting process is a very crucial element to the evolution of his final images. Each piece is rendered using only black paint and turpentine. Lyle begins his process by priming a panel with white gesso. He then paints a thin, rich, oily black veneer over the primed panel, slowly and systematically developing his images by removing some of the black paint with a cloth. In doing so, Lyle renders layer upon layer of various values of black paint resulting in his signature-style of luminescent works.
In Everyone’s A Critic, we see how Lyle’s methodology combined with his acerbic wit creates an altered reality rife with cynicism and bursting with humor. Lyle is impeccably faithful to the vintage photographs that inspire his work - until a point in which he instills a cultural reference so familiar, yet iconoclastic, as to leave the viewer wincing, laughing, or really thinking -- often it is all three.
This series presents a wonderfully caustic commentary on the art world. Lyle, who is one part voyeur and one part participant, renders images that embrace much of what mystifies the public about the art world – art that is not made by the artists’ themselves, money as an end game, art-speak, etc. Everyone’s A Critic will surely leave you laughing, but the joke may be on us!
David Lyle attended the University of California at Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies. His work has been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, CA and in France and Japan and been featured in publications such as New York Magazine, Modern Painter, New American Paintings, American Artist, Hi-Fructose, Proximity Magazine and Coast Magazine. This is David Lyle’s third solo exhibition with Lyons Wier Gallery.
