Opening Season: Abstraction and Landscape Part I: Cynthia Lin at Satchel Projects

StoneRoots 5770 InvBluGr, 2025, 60 x 48 inches, in Cynthia Lin's solo exhibition Strange Twin at Satchel Projects. For accurate color and press release visit https://www.satchelprojects.com/cynthia-lin

StoneRoots 5770 InvBluGr is a photographed landscape turned vertically. The upturned shoreline mirrors human bodies, once more reflected within cultural and political shifts both stolid and dissolving. Lin, a Taiwanese-born, long-time New York resident, instinctively recognizes translation's displacements. Her work encompasses the multiple dislocations, from landscape to climate change, that increasingly turns things sideways.

BoulderStoneRoot5777PinkAquaShimmer, 2025, 54 x 50 inches

Acrylic is swapped for oil in the new work, yet the former soft, repetitive charcoal strokes of  in earlier work now stacks small, linear brushstrokes into dense networks of texture. Color is painted in simultaneous contrast, forming volumetric bodies that then dissipate back into marks.

Overturned5717 InvPinkIceBlue, 2025, oil on panel, 20 x 24 inches

A landscape assembled from the many photos Lin takes when kayaking. We can imagine the relaxation of being on the water, gazing at reflections. Yet a wing-like form flays open, overturning Soutine's carcass of beef into reposing body, shell, or shroud. The form is both solid and ephemeral, opening the page to future paintings.

StoneRoots5770 InvTurqBl, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

Channeling Ingre's portrait of Monsieur Bertin as a supplicant, branch hands reach toward us  beneath a divided head. Staring into the paint yields odd associations, including Viennese painters Gustave Klimt or Dagobert Peche in how patterns tumble from the body. Yet the form remains a landscape turned on its side; we can never forget its dual nature, or the fact we're caught in between.

BoneBranch5007, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 11 inches

As the first chronological painting, this painting becomes a presiding spirit and presents a compression the most recent work revisits. A bucolic scene of river and wood re-envisioned as a ganglia of internal organs shows the ease with which experience becomes code, yielding new images to amplify shared experience. At the same time these works are distinctly paintings, fully rendered in oil so that for one generation, they represent disintegration and for another construction.