Peter Lyons
On-Ramp

Trident Gallery is very pleased to present On-Ramp, an exhibition of new and recent oil paintings by Peter Lyons.

Peter Lyons’s paintings are on-ramps to a free way beyond the senses, to a dimension transcending and uniting geographical places — Spain, Manhattan, Japan, Natick, Allston, Gloucester. Their exquisite realism is a lure to spiritual transport.

The centerpiece of On-Ramp is a triumphant scene of Mount Yōtei in Hokkaidō, Japan, which pays homage to the unities within Japanese art and culture of religious and secular life, of representation and abstraction, and of the natural and the stylized. At 5½’ x 8′, it is the largest painting Lyons has made.

Lyons proposes these unities as gateways to spiritual awareness in paintings that test the boundaries of abstraction or dwell in the solitude of a natural landscape. The Christian iconography of The Valley, a 2010 masterpiece shown for the first time, is echoed in the powerful new Resurrection.

Lyons’s paintings also illuminate other points of entry — childlike joy in bright colors, nocturnes in which briefly the veil drops which obscured the divinity of stars, and a telltale wind sleeve taking the measure of invisible inspirations.

In the surreal American Milkshake, Lyons locates the spiritual coordinates of an era. As exuberantly artificial as the synthetic flavorings of the mid-century desserts which made America great, the painting expresses deep ambivalence towards the era that was our collective on-ramp to trust in technology for personal and national fulfillment.

I invite you on this journey.

— Matthew Swift