Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Patinated – Opening Reception

In Patinated, Lyndon Barrois Jr. considers the patina that forms on an object over time: a physical change to its surface, but also evidence of where it has been, who has handled it, and how its value has been determined.

The exhibition grew in part from Barrois’s collection of vintage auction catalogs documenting art and artifacts from Africa and the Americas. Their descriptions often offer remarkably little information about the objects they depict. Phrases like “light patina” and “yellow patina” stand in for an object’s material history; an occasional note like “probably collected in 1893” opens onto a much larger one. For Barrois, that date points toward the violent extraction of objects from the Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II and the systems of collecting, selling, and display that followed.

Barrois works through that history by copying, remaking, and rearranging images. Paintings and objects in Patinated draw from Belgian Art Nouveau, film stills, museum displays, auction catalogs, and existing poetry and captions. Rather than treating any one image as complete, Barrois puts them into conversation, allowing meaning to accumulate through repetition and proximity.

Cinema provides one model for this approach. Barrois describes himself as working something like a prop master, assembling objects and images to build a scene rather than a single fixed narrative. Painting becomes less a record of the artist’s hand than a way of testing surfaces: what they reveal, what they disguise, and what we are willing to believe about them.

About the Artist

Lyndon Barrois Jr. is an artist based in Toronto and Assistant Professor of Art at York University. Using cinema as a way to move across time and geography, his work considers anachronism, simultaneity, reanimation, and the histories carried by images and objects. His current work draws on the conventions of heist films and museum display to contend with legacies of colonial extraction.

Barrois received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and his BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has completed residencies and fellowships at LATITUDE Chicago, Loghaven, the Jan van Eyck Academie, Fogo Island Arts, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He is also one half of LAB-D Studios with artist Addoley Dzegede.