LINN LÜHN is delighted to announce Sean Sullivan’s second solo exhibition, Lika a Mirror Facing a Mirror, which, drawing on a complex artistic process of image-making that straddles monotype, drawing, writing, and painting, centers on the moment of a mirror reflection. A moment in which the images of our perception intertwine and the boundaries of space and reflection collapse, casting doubt on every form of surface.

Created through a complex process of transferring drawings and prints – in which oil paints are applied to Japanese printing paper and canvas using stencils and rulers in a hybrid technique – Sullivan’s works evoke a dense world of abstract planes and layers of color that, like a facsimile, reveal a glimpse of the images’ inner architecture, emerging from its hidden depths. Within it, forms – as in the juxtaposition of two mirrors – transform into an infinite cabinet of compositional reflections: dots, rectangles, and squares subtly blend the traces of early 20th-century design and print traditions with references to abstract modernism, finding their pictorial-musical echo in titles such as The Composer. Arranged in structures that are at times dense, Sullivan’s principles of order only appear to follow a discernible external logicplayfully translated into the negative of a composition consisting of colorful borders in Transliteration Pt. 1, whose positive is transformed in Pt. 2 into the red gradation of a finely structured tectonic arrangement.

As resonating bodies, Sullivan’s works simultaneously challenge the notion of a fixed, flawless process of image formation and visualize the emerging work as something in the process of becoming. As a process of transcription that sets free the colored traces of the images within the paradox of fixed boundaries. Within this process, Sullivan creates voids and leaves reference and transference open as means of visual communication in the moment of an infinitely expanding composition. Hypnotic and like the constant refractions of a prismatic body, their structures of pink, green, and brown tones shift once again into something imperfect in the reflection of their fragments. Yet, much like an echo, their appearance also points to a surface. A repetitive fragmentation of parts – whose forms seem to echo and amplify one another – and whose observation always appears to be preceded by a reflection. A surface that, through traces and repeated images, seems to reduce the blue rectangles of its frames to absurdity in the illusion of the mirror.

If we dare to take the look in the mirror suggested by Sullivan, it reveals something true: a reality that only reveals its traces at the moment of reflection and that seems to lie hidden behind what presents itself to our everyday perception as real. An illusion that reveals itself in set pieces, in parts, and in fragments. And an appearance that, as a structure of forms, lines, and circles, shifts like a distorted image, prism-like, between lie and truth, between copy and original. But which reflection contains the truth? The one that articulates and re-encodes Sullivan’s Glyphs in the newly created canvas works through streaks and traces? The one that, like The ocean at night, multiplies in the gentle stillness of a deep-blue print? Or the one that, as A dream of absolute communication, creates a counterpart, whose fragments, in the doubling of two mirrors, tell of another reality of the images.