Lyndon Barrois Jr
Untitled (Kinfolk), Magazine clippings, oil on canvas, solvent transfer, chipboard, oak frame, 25” x 20”, 2017
“I began to see [the CMYK halftone color palette] as a collaborative system towards resolution, in which separate matrices of color cooperate. The social and cultural implication of this cannot be unseen.”
Lyndon Barrois Jr. is an artist living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA). Their approach to color is guided by the structures of commercial printing and civic design, and their approach to printmaking is scrappy and vernacular. Lyndon’s project-based work spans across painting, collage, and sculpture, and often makes use of transfer print techniques, and occasionally lithographic or silkscreen processes.
Currently Lyndon is working on a range of projects using vintage advertising and filmic references to explore image-making in relation to themes of desire, progress, value, and mortality.
What are the direct references, research, or aspects of history that your work includes?
Lately it has been a combination of advertising from National Geographic, graphics from consumer packaging, and selected film stills that I re-present in print form. The hyper-saturated color of the Technicolor films from the 40s and 50s, along with the sets they were shot on, are alluring and magical.
I love hand-tinted photographs, and animation CELs; images that deal with transparency to navigate depth. Like printing, the shift from black and white to color in film and photography (among other things) is always negotiating the gap between perception and reality, and I am consistently intrigued by the capacity these fictions have in affecting us, and how these affects shift across time and subject matter.
Formafantasma, Solvent transfers on canvas and chipboard, halftone laser print, oak frame. 23” x 29”, 2017
Perfect Form, Solvent transfer on palm wood,dyed hemp, thread, newspaper wood, 19” x 23”, 2018
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
I’ve always enjoyed translations, or adaptations of content from one medium to another, and printmaking processes have been effective solutions to explore these possibilities. As someone coming from a painting practice, working primarily with photography, printmaking, and its chromatic potential is the perfect intermediary between those two mediums. Transfer printing in particular retains some of the painterly surface quality and versatility that is very useful to me and the themes I tend to work with.
Since my entry to printing was through magazines (and their deconstructing), I tend to fixate on the structures of commercial image circulation. So the limited color palette, scale, machinery, packaging, etc. become mined for formal opportunities, or sculptural situations point back to the construction of the image.
When I began making drawings again it was with the pigment from toner cartridges. In the event that I do feel moved to make oil paintings, I keep it limited to cyan, magenta, yellow and black. So there’s been a reflexive process to maintain continuity, but funneled through a print-based conversation.
“I love hand-tinted photographs, and animation CELs; images that deal with transparency to navigate depth.”
What cultural aspects of color are built into your work?
I’ve adopted the CMYK color palette as a framing device or recurring motif, like a skeleton key that connects across many projects, sometimes subtly, other times explicitly. Initially I was drawn to the halftones of commercial printing, partially for aesthetic purposes, but then as an exposure of artificiality and flatness. It still blows my mind that we can make full-color photographs from flat dots of just four colors. Rendering images in halftone also emerged as a convenient solution to resurrect richness to poor quality images.
Thinking further, I began to see this as a collaborative system towards resolution, in which separate matrices of color cooperate. The social and cultural implication of this cannot be unseen. Then there are the surfaces that these colors operate on, the light that makes them legible coming from the white of the page. But I’m always wondering if this default can be subverted, using brown and other mid-tones to function as alternative foundations for beginning.
Tomorrow in Hindsight, 4-color silkscreen, 32” x 60”, 2019