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 reflected within cultural and political shifts both solid and dissolving. Lin, a Taiwanese-born, long-term New York resident, instinctively recognizes translation's displacements. Her work encompasses the multiple dislocations, from landscape to climate change, that increasingly turn things sideways.

BoulderStoneRoot5777PinkAquaShimmer, 2025, 54 x 50 inches

Acrylic is swapped for oil in the new works. The soft, repetitive charcoal strokes in earlier drawings of skin now form small, linear brushstrokes compiling networks of texture. Color is painted in simultaneous contrast, forming volumetric bodies that dissipate into the marks.

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

A landscape assembled from the many photos Lin takes on the lake. We imagine the relaxation of kayaking on the water, gazing at reflections. Yet a wing-like form flays open, overturning Soutine's carcass of beef into reposed body, shell, or shroud. The form is both solid and ephemeral, beckoning 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 form the body. Yet the form remains a landscape turned sideways; we don't forget this dual nature, or that we're caught between.

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

As the first chronological painting, this painting becomes a presiding spirit. It presents a compression revisited in the most recent works (not included here). A bucolic scene of river and wood re-envisioned as a ganglia of internal organs shows how easily the physical becomes codes. The codes renew and amplify shared experiences. Yet at the same time these paintings are complete as paintings. For one generation, they represent disintegration, while for another, construction.