Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Lauren Quin paints as if every brushstroke carries within it the electric charge of a revelation. In the vast plant-filled space of her Culver City studio, where six giant palm trees thrive in a former nursery, this thirty-three-year-old artist develops an abstract painting that stubbornly refuses any form of resolution. Her monumental canvases, sometimes as wide as four and a half meters, overflow with a chromatic energy that seems to defy the laws of visual physics. These works do not merely occupy space; they devour it, transforming it into a territory where perception teeters between order and chaos.
Lauren Quin’s creative process reveals a methodological approach that strangely evokes Bergson’s conception of duration. Henri Bergson distinguished lived duration from the mechanized time of science, contrasting the qualitative experience of time with its quantitative measure [1]. When Quin layers her paint “tubes” in successive layers, then engraves them with a butter knife before the matter dries, she inscribes this particular temporality that Bergson called real duration directly into the work. Each pictorial gesture carries the trace of its temporal urgency, creating what the artist describes as an “athletic” process dictated by the passage of time. This approach reveals an intuitive understanding of what Bergson called “succession without absolute distinction,” where each moment interpenetrates the next in a continuous flow.
Quin’s technique revolves around an interesting temporal paradox: she deliberately begins by creating something she deems unsatisfactory, then completely covers it and reveals it through subtraction. This method of simultaneous accumulation and excavation evokes Bergson’s conception of pure memory, that deep layer of consciousness where the past coexists with the present without ever reducing to it. When she engraves her repetitive motifs into the still-wet paint, Quin brings to the surface earlier strata that create a moiré optical effect, transforming the surface into a visual testimony where each layer dialogues with the others in a stratified temporality.
This layered approach to pictorial time finds a remarkable echo in Bergson’s analysis of consciousness. For Bergson, consciousness was never a fixed state but a process of continuous interpenetration between present and past, where each moment is enriched by the memory of all previous moments [2]. Quin’s paintings materialize this conception: her colored “tubes” are never identical from one occurrence to another; they modify according to their position in the overall composition, creating what she calls a “competitive multiplicity” where each element fights for attention without ever definitively dominating. This permanent visual battle generates a specific temporality, that of a present perpetually constituting itself from its own internal contradictions.
Quin’s use of monotype lithography from the back of the canvas adds an additional dimension to this complex temporality. Working blindly, without directly seeing the effects of her gestures, she introduces a degree of unpredictability that recalls Bergsonian approaches to the élan vital. This technique creates controlled accidents that disrupt the pre-established organization of the surface, generating areas of iridescence where the light seems to emanate from the very matter itself. These blind interventions function as temporal interruptions that break traditional causal logic and introduce what Bergson called radical novelty, this capacity of time to produce something truly unprecedented.
Quin’s relationship to color also reveals a deep understanding of temporal stakes. She favors “competitive” hues that refuse to stabilize in a harmonious balance, creating chromatic tensions that keep the eye in a state of permanent alertness. This coloristic instability evokes Bergson’s conception of perception as an active process: we never perceive passively but continuously reconstruct our vision of the world from sensory data filtered according to our vital interests. Quin’s colors operate according to this logic: they compel the viewer to perpetually reconstruct her perception of the work, forbidding any definitive reading.
The influence of stream-of-consciousness literary technique on contemporary art finds a particularly convincing plastic translation in Quin’s work. This narrative technique, developed by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce at the beginning of the twentieth century, sought to reproduce the uninterrupted flow of conscious thought with its free associations, repetitions, and sudden changes of direction [3]. Quin’s paintings operate according to a similar logic: they present a continuous visual flow where forms appear, transform, and disappear according to associative rather than narrative logic. This approach reveals a deep kinship with the modernist aesthetic that sought to account for the subjective experience of time rather than its objective measurement.
The obsessive repetition of motifs in Quin’s work evokes Woolf’s technique of thematic variation. In “Mrs Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf used recurring leitmotifs, the chimes of Big Ben, reflections on the passage of time, to create a complex temporal unity where past and present intermingle [4]. Similarly, Quin develops a vocabulary of recurring forms, hands, spiders, needles, cymbals, which she repeats and transforms from one work to another. These motifs function as mnemonic anchors that allow the viewer to navigate the visual complexity while maintaining a sense of unsettling familiarity.
The stream-of-consciousness narrative technique also sought to abolish the traditional distinction between direct and indirect discourse, creating an ambiguous narrative space where the narrator’s thoughts and those of the characters blend. Quin performs a similar transformation by blurring the boundaries between figure and ground, between additive and subtractive marks. Her engravings into the fresh paint create negative spaces that become as visually present as the areas of pure color, generating a perceptual ambiguity that keeps the viewer in a state of productive uncertainty.
This aesthetic of ambiguity reveals a fine understanding of the psychological issues of perception. Like stream-of-consciousness writers, Quin is less interested in what is shown than in how it is perceived. Her works represent nothing identifiable but generate particular perceptual states, qualities of attention that modify our relationship to time and space. This approach is part of the modernist tradition that favored exploring the mechanisms of consciousness over describing the external world.
The monumental scale of many of Quin’s works plays a major role in this perceptual strategy. By widely exceeding the normal field of vision, these paintings force the viewer to move physically to apprehend them, introducing a temporal dimension into the very act of looking. This temporalization of vision evokes Bergsonian analyses of perception as a process spread over time. For Bergson, we never perceive instantaneously but reconstruct our vision of the world through a progressive accumulation of sensory impressions that synthesize in immediate memory.
The title “Logopanic” of the 2024 exhibition at 125 Newbury reveals a keen awareness of the linguistic issues of abstraction. This neologism, formed from the Greek terms “logos” (word) and “penia” (poverty), evokes an anxiety in the face of the collapse of systems of meaning. This metalinguistic dimension brings Quin closer to modernist concerns about the crisis of language and the necessity to invent new forms of expression. Her paintings function as a visual language in perpetual transformation, where signs dissolve at the very moment they seem to be constituted.
This semiotic instability creates a particular temporality, that of the perpetual emergence of meaning. Quin’s works keep the viewer in a state of productive waiting, that cognitive tension Bergson identified as characteristic of living consciousness. They refuse the immediate gratification of recognition to keep active that faculty of attention that Bergson considered the very essence of mental life.
Quin’s approach also reveals an intuitive understanding of what Bergson called the mutual interpenetration of states of consciousness. In her paintings, no element exists in isolation; each shape, each color, each texture resonates with the whole according to a logic of reciprocal influence. This holistic approach generates visual effects that far exceed the sum of their components, creating what the artist describes as “controlled explosions” where energy seems to emanate from the pictorial matter itself.
The influence of Los Angeles on Quin’s evolution as a colorist is also particularly interesting. The artist states that each return to this city makes her chromatic palette “explode,” revealing a particular sensitivity to the atmospheric qualities of Californian light. This relationship to the luminous environment evokes Bergsonian analyses of perception as a process of continuous adaptation to external conditions. Color, for Quin, never functions as mere decoration but as a revealer of a particular state of consciousness, generating specific qualities of attention that modify our relationship to time and space.
Lauren Quin’s art ultimately reveals a remarkable understanding of the contemporary issues in abstract painting. By rejecting both gestural expressionism and conceptual minimalism, she develops a middle path that rehabilitates perceptual complexity without falling into decorative overload. Her works function as machines producing lived time, generators of particular states of consciousness that reveal the unsuspected richness of visual experience. In an artistic context often dominated by spectacular immediacy, Quin proposes an aesthetics of duration that reconnects with the highest ambitions of modernist art while adapting them to contemporary conditions.
- Henri Bergson, Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1889
- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory: Essay on the Relationship of the Body to the Mind, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1896
- Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, The Common Reader, London, Hogarth Press, 1925
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press, 1925
