Resin strata sits on top the photographs from his father’s archive. These are family memories from Linnenbrink’s childhood and his father’s work travels that got buried below layers of time and experiences. The actual slides from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, the photographs used for this show were taken in Rumania, the USA, The Philippines and Pakistan. The geological metaphor connects with Stephen Kosslyn’s picture theory of mental images – Aristotle, Descartes and Locke had already tapped into this topic. Considering mental images are not viewed with real eyes, the claims of Kosslyn’s theory might be a bit puzzling. Here is when photography’s evocative power acquires such importance. “There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida). A color-stripe pattern partially covers the image. Fragments of it are buried inaccessible. They are lost for good behind The colored resin, making it difficult for the eye to discern just exactly what it sees. The drips are—in the artist’s own words—“like the curtain of time covering things”. Linnenbrink’s work is nothing if not a metaphor for the mutability of our own lives, our own eventually ceasing breaths.

Rooted in Morris Louis and Gene Davis’s practice, that is the Washington Color School, Linnenbrink grants color a main role with an impersonal quality. “I make decisions that come more out of the painting than the photograph,” he notes. “It’s an exercise in letting go, to not hold on too much to the imagery. I have to think about the painting that it’s becoming.”