Lumière Art Gallery is happy to inaugurate the exhibition “Of the Body” with the works of Chris Gaynor on the 4th of May at 19h00 in the presence of the artist.
Of The Body is an exploration of physical memory, of experience that is held within the human form. The works are gestural in nature, they are from the body, not solely the action of the hand but the body also and all the while underpinned by poetic reference. Their abstracted form opens their reading up to a universal plane.
The works are reflective, they are lyrical and they are to be experienced independently. Each work holds the space of a song, the ever present poetic references shift between the atavistic, the historical and the spiritual. They are an exploration of the self.
Using commercial (flexographic) printers ink and a woven industrial paper (designed for paper bag manufacture), this body of work, while technically, may be categorized as drawing, embody painterly characteristics that blur the line between the two practices.
Each work is a reflection of a fresh vision, yet ever expanding in spiritual affirmation. The free flowing, repeated gesture, is an exercise in exploring the possibilities of an organic, personal calligraphy.
The work exhibited in Of The Body is a selection from 80-odd pieces that were made over a month long period in an industrial printers shed in Brisbane, Australia before moving to Greece.
These drawings are an uninhibited catharsis of the body, mind / heart and soul, coupled with an elevation of the vehicle of raw materials, that at one time, I merely considered no more than my laboring tools.
Chris Gaynor is an Australian-Cypriot artist, currently based in Athens. While commencing his BFA at the Queensland College of Art in 2021, Gaynor was introduced to the senior Australian painter Leonard Brown (b.1949 -) and has since been under the celebrated artist’s mentorship. In November 2022, Gaynor was the artist in residence at Phoenix Gallery in Athens and had his maiden solo show the following month. His work is held in private collections in New York, Jakarta, Limassol, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Although a recent entrant into the ‘art world’, Gaynor has spent the past decade actively developing a visual vocabulary by participating within a diverse range of creative practices.
Among other roles, Gaynor’s background has involved apprenticing under an international tailor in Sydney, assisting a renowned fashion photographer and menswear stylist in London, and while in Brisbane, engaged in self-directed furniture design. He has also written and directed a short film.
All these experiences have no doubt informed Gaynor’s aesthetic sensibility, but upon discovering the possibilities offered by painting and drawing he unreservedly made them his preferred forms of expression. Through the humility of their innate materiality, he believes that they are most effective in articulating abstract and poetic thought that, when experienced, reveals a spiritual place that is ever expanding and potentially beautiful.
