Richard Milazzo writes: “Here are paintings, by Francie Lyshak, in the avant-garde ‘tradition’ of Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, and strangely, Antonin Artaud:  paintings that are unfashionable ‘victims’ of ontological groundlessness passing for sensuous surfaces bearing only the barest transcendent signs of aesthetic survival – swirls, scrapings, palette knifings, dustings, inscriptions, mercy killings.  It takes some kind of courage to assert linguistic and meta-linguistic figurations of any kind – ‘grounds’ for existence, as it were – in the full knowledge that the rug is going to be pulled out from under your feet at any moment. Call this ‘knowledge’ what you will – painting, writing, signaling through the flames; I call it the groundlessness upon which all Being is rooted.  Heidegger might have described it as the local domestic being of each individual, exquisite and dire, as he or she or it makes their way through the world. It is this journey Francie Lyshak is documenting for us with these consummately indiscernible but brave, luscious, painterly self-indulgences.”