Lyndi Sales — On Being — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 6 → June 27, 2021

Lyndi Sales is searching.
She is searching for an elsewhere and is searching for a reunion. An escape to better connect to the world, to others, to herself. A love quest in the platonic sense, where love means a progression towards the knowledge of beauty and in fine the access to the indivisible(the definition of Diotima in Plato’s Banquet).
Lyndi Sales’ work process is meditative: she repeats gestures in a carefully crafted sound universe to provoke specific emotions (sadness, euphoria, melancholia, ecstasy) in order to enter a state of maximum receptivity… A dream of Utopia in response to a void, the feeling of being separated from others, even though beings are the universe and breathe together. The artist aspires to overcome contradictory emotions that characterize human life, by opening herself to an interior, contemplative world leading to other levels of consciousness. By doing so, she reaches new visions and distances herself from a sometimes hurtful societal reality.

Observing nature (whether organic and geological), what lies beneath our feet or above our heads, has been present in Lyndi Sales’ work for a long time. She goes from the micro to the macro, from the concrete to the abstract. She likes showing sometimes unsettling parallels that exist in these distinctive worlds.
Photographs of crystals, the beauty of a mushroom or satellite images of Earth and Space; Lyndi Sales retains shapes, soft movements or, on the contrary, rectilinear structures. Thus her works reflect both the organic world of Nature and its sequencing in “rows and boxes” by mankind.
Deeply influenced as well by Aldous Huxley’s writing and his use of mescaline, Lyndi Sales experiments with hallucinogens and practices different techniques of meditation and yoga to access an alternative reality. When she took Ayahuasca in Brazil, she saw ephemeral luminous beings; visions she transposes in two dimensions, like when one places a specimen between two slabs of glass to do a microscopic study.

According to the theories of certain mystics, fragments of beings circulate in the universe and the individual’s existential travel consists in trying to collect them to be whole again. Inspired by these theories Lyndi Sales creates dynamic and radiant compositions made of paper, fabric or geographic maps (Radiating fulfilment, Amor Fati, Common love or celestial love: Somethings are simple others are hard to explain…). First covering the surface with spray paint or light strokes of colour — going from obscurity to light in a progressive dilution — she then minutely cuts these surfaces and recomposes the fragments in an intuitive manner.

Her strong interest in cartography also led her to embroider an ensemble of maps on linen canvases. Dreams, glimpses of worlds, imaginary cities: these tapestries with their minuscule stitches, stones and golden thread circles inspire infinite tales (Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole and Catacomb dream map — A place where I found moments of resolution).

In a series of drawings made with an aerograph, a recurrent shape coils like whirlwinds and galaxies or unfolds in the manner of fine mechanics that open and close (wings, petals)… Both graphic and evanescent, a strong, almost hypnotizing luminosity radiates from them (Hit me like a ray of sun, It’s like I’ve been awakened…).

These works on paper contrast with the ambiguous beauty of the installation Meteoric Rainbow made of 22 knobkierries covered in colored thread, as a reference to the rainbow nation (South Africa). A traditional club, a walking stick, a symbol of protection and honor with a highly emotional value, the knobkierrie is often sported by contemporary South African protesters. With this seemingly playful work, Lyndi Sales shows that, beyond her transcendental quest, she remains firmly anchored in the complex reality of her country.

b a c k g r o u n d

Lyndi Sales (born in 1973 in Johannesburg, South Africa) has been widely exhibited for over twenty years (United States, Europe, Australia, Asia and South Africa). In 2011, she represented South Africa in the 54th Venice Biennale.

In France, her work is currently being presented in Transport Commun (curator: Marie-Ann Yemsi) at the Tours de la Société Générale (Paris, La Défense) and will be shown from July onwards in Cosmogonies — Zinsou, une collection africaine (Cosmogonies- Zinsou, an African collection) at the MO.CO in Montpellier (curators: Pauline Faure and Rahmouna Boutayeb).

Her works are part of a large number of prestigious collections: The National Gallery of Art, Washington; New York Public Library, NYC; Library of Congress, Washington DC; McGill University, Montréal; Arthur and Matta Jaffe Collection, Florida Atlantic University; Jack Ginsberg artist book collection, South Africa; Ernst & Young, ABSA, Telkom (South Africa) and Red Bull, Austria, Collection Zinsou, Benin. In France, Lyndi Sales is represented in the collections of the FRAC Normandie Rouen and the collection of the Société Générale.

Lyndi Sales has also created a considerable number of monumental commissions for private and public clients: Mandela stone installation for Norton Rose in Johannesburg in 2012, Satellite telescope for Cape Town University in 2013, an installation for Facebook (Johannesburg, 2017) and the mural work Chaos and flow, love and fear for Texas A&M College of Engineering (Brian, 2018).

The Galerie Maria Lund has welcomed four personal exhibitions of the artist (In transit — 2009; Passive surveillance — 2012 ; Lumière préternaturelle — 2014; Un jour j’ai trouvé un papillon arc-en-ciel — 2019) and has shown her works in several fairs (KIAF — Séoul, 2017 ; Art Paris, 2015 ; Art on paper — Brussels, 2013; Drawing Now — Paris, 2011; DDESSIN- Paris, 2019, Chic dessin — Paris, 2010).
During the summer 2014, her installation Audience was presented at the Bon Marché Rive Gauche, Paris.