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Rhys Lee
Squad of Crack
18 may – 29 june 2004 |
"You’ve walked into someone else’s headspace. It’s vivid and strong, chaotic and alive. It’s familiar, and you can kind of hear the soundtrack, but its definitely not yours. Rhys‘s work is an amalgam of simply being, of absorbing everything he comes into contact with and letting it distill in his
mind."
Rhys’s use of line, colour and composition invoke an urgency, an energy and one is left looking at a canvas that is sensual and haunting. The paintings are alive due to their simplicity, and directness, but survive by seducing the viewer into a multitude of layers.
"This is an artist who likes to work broad and bold. Lee takes off from impromptu and almost automatic sketches. We see Lee’s figures and forms distended, dilated and augmented. His figures lounge, pout, stare, smoke and pose with a slacker casualness verging on disdain. These people are idiosyncratic characters, and yet are also vague, blank personalities. Pretty but dumb, they make up a languorous and droll, ambient crew, carelessly hanging out while checking each other out. They are what we look like when we look at our own contemporary models of good-looking deportment.
Lee’s artwork retains the structure and principles intrinsic to design and he merges this with painting and drawing to create a minimal figurative style defined by a strong gestural use of line, rich abstracted planes of colour, and a bold use of juxtaposition which allows surfaces to become engorged and enlivened.
Some critics have likened Lee's use of 'nervous erotic contours' to that of Austrian artist, Egon Schiele; others, his
'primitive' use of line to 1980s art star Jean-Michel Basquiat. But perhaps the most apt and contemporary analogy, as offered by one writer, is the similarity in sensation of experiencing Lee's explosive combination of colour and imagery and the rush of street noise which overwhelms the senses when exiting an air-conditioned office building.
Lee revels in the act of doing. His main motivation is drawing - cool, casual and elegantly edgy. His compositions are informal and spontaneous and the seemingly artless execution barely hides a concern for deep personal connection, new meaning and social identity.
* excerpts from articles by Hannah Mathews , Edward Colless and Ken Wach.
Rhys Lee is represented by helengory galerie
WHAT: Squad of Crack
WHO: Rhys Lee
WHEN: 18 May – 30 June
WHERE: Hero Building Billboard
Cnr Russell St and Little Collins St, Melbourne
MEDIA ENQUIRIES:
PRUE BASSETT PUBLICITY Ph: 03 9820 5400 E: [email protected] |
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