Thursday, June 5, 2014–Friday, July 25, 2014
518 Julia Street
New Orleans, LA 70130 USA
Artist’s Reception: Saturday June 7th, 6 – 9 PM
James Flynn’s fascinations with light, color, and perception inform the visually seductive,
thematically evocative paintings in his exhibition, Qualia. That word, a Latin term describing the
un-transferable subjectivity of consciousness, encapsulates what viewers experience in Flynn’s
scintillating compositions: a unique personal interaction with his meticulous commingling of
image and color. The enigmatic geometries in his paintings—concentric circles, curvilinear and
angular formations—link his visual syntax to timeless forms that have appeared and reappeared
across all the world’s cultures. In the lineages of Georges Seurat’s “chromoluminarism,” the
dimensional illusionism of Victor Vasarely, and the color interaction theory of Josef Albers, Flynn’s
paintings also owe much to his longtime association with his mentor, Mexican Surrealist Pedro Friedeberg, and his position as studio assistant to the American artist Peter Lobello. Friedeberg
and Lobello, in many ways polar in their sensibilities, exerted profound and complementary
influences on Flynn as a visual thinker. “I have one foot in Friedeberg’s world, which is
archetypal and symbolic,” he observes, “and another in Lobello’s world, which is large-scale
Abstract Minimalism.”
Flynn’s paintings conjure landscapes and mindscapes of exhilarating spatial ambiguity.
They often create the appearance of slow, wave-like pulsations, which draw viewers in and
induce a meditative state that is alternately kinetic and calmative. Flynn applies pure color
unmixed, such that the resulting hues coalesce in the viewer’s optical perception. Shapes and
colors appear to subtly shift or change with the viewer’s position and the angle and intensity of
light. These shifts and pulsations are heightened by the artist’s use of pearlescent and iridescent
paints in a reductivist palette of two or three colors—inspired by the brilliant iridescence of
Amazonian macaws and the Blue Morpho butterfly of Brazil.
The artist’s background in intaglio printmaking is evident in the intricately layered
surfaces of his paintings. These layers impart a subtle relief, interacting dramatically with the light
source. “When the lights are low, or as daylight fades,” he notes, “the colors start to glow and
vibrate, and all of a sudden, the iridescence is lifting the forms off the dark background.” Those
inky, void-like backgrounds—and the shapes that arise from them—are richly symbolic,
referencing Flynn’s interests in Particle physics, Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, Jungian
psychology, and dream states. Into this alchemical admixture of meaning, viewers bring their
own interpretations, captivated by the paintings’ vibrant, ever-changing play of light, material,
and the intersection of the optical and psychological.
CALLAN CONTEMPORARY hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 10 am-5 pm. For more information,
please contact gallery owner Borislava Callan at 504.525.0518 or visit our website at
www.callancontemporary.com