As the international art community converges in Los Angeles to start 2019 with the LA Art Show, LA Contemporary, and the first LA editions of Frieze and Superfine!, de Plume presents a solo show by New Zealand artist Tyrone Layne. Based in Sydney, his new body of work featuring oil paintings of the coast finds an apt setting in LA. Titled “Dystopia” this grouping of Layne’s latest paintings is set in desolate, polluted seas, where no sign of life is visible, only the destruction of an over-indulgent society. These paintings are a prognosis of our minds, subjected to force-fed advertising, which Layne terms digital pollution. The random splashes of color and marks could represent fragments of all the images our brain takes in each day, blurring into an abstract memory. Although he has tried to abandon recognizable forms and move into pure abstraction, there still is a sense of figurative and landscape elements coming out of Layne’s abstract shapes and brush marks. He sees them as a representation of the uncertainty of modern times, a portrait of current or future societies. Since late 2017 Tyrone Layne has been working on two different bodies of work in his Sydney studio--his intricate figurative Peoplescapes, along with his new abstract paintings. His motivation comes from current contemporary artists such as Rudolf Stingel, Ugo Rondinone, and Gerhard Richter who switch between making abstract and realism paintings in concurrent bodies of work.