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 in cultural and political shifts, both stolid and dissolving. Lin, Taiwanese-born and a long-time New York resident, instinctively recognizes translation's displacements. Her work encompasses multiple dislocations, from landscape to climate change, that increasingly turns things sideways.

BoulderStoneRoot5777PinkAquaShimmer, 2025, 54 x 50 inches

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

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

A landscape assembled from the many photos Lin takes when kayaking. Here, 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, an open book for 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 out from the painting beneath a divided head. Staring into the paint yields odd associations, including Viennese painter Klimt and Dagobert Peche in the way patterns inflate and tumble from the body. Yet it remains a landscape turned on its side.

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

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