Plan3: Theresia Lynch
Published: 31th May 2008

KRISTIANSTAD ART

The former model and fashion photographer Theresia Lynch has turned her back on the fashion world to enter the art world. The result can currently be seen on Octava Gallery Plan3. Isac Nordgren sees a promising artist.

Lynch makes digital photomontage that she prints out on water-colour paper which makes it look like the images seem to be sketched in charcoal or pencil. The effect is most evident in the exhibition the first room where black dominates.

Very best is the series, "Anaesthetised Lullaby," three different pictures of the same building as seen through a prism or a kaleidoscope, and the unpleasant "Utopia Estate" in which high-rises seem to collapse into the picture.

"Tapping in on Wires" and "Inside my loop" look like out of focus charcoal drawings where the black has almost imperceptibly been smudged out. Lynch gives in these works the impression of being an artist whose ideas revolve around architecture and urban life, the cold hard city vs. man.

"Escape Road" stands out by the notes written to the image, the wording is most important and the picture is forced to take a step back. In form of a "mind-map" Lynch draws arrows between the extremes, and engages the viewer in a very personal discussion on assessment, criticism and self-image.

In the exhibition second room Lynch mixes in both colour and a more advertising-like imagery in her works. The series "Sucker Love" hangs on the left wall, six pictures in which Lynch plays with the word "Bullshit" and the phrase "Love you forever. In "Vitreous" the text is even more in focus and it is difficult not to think of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, two artists that Lynch may very well have been inspired by.

Lynch lets one phrase, the sentence, "If I want anything it 's denied to me," constitute the essence of the art itself. But while Kruger, and Holzer, tends to turn their messages outwards, Lynch is instead personal and her texts are more like diary notes.

What she has in common with Kruger is the grip to make use of more commercial forms of presentations and in some works Lynch's background in the fashion world is inevitably shining through.

What is making Lynch so promising is her many faces as an artist. In a couple of works, mainly the collage of eyes "Synchronised Mirrors", Lynch seems more like a surrealist, to add to her other forms of expression.

Theresia Lynch will certainly be intersting to follow in the future.

Isac Nordgren