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Rhys Lee
Salads and Forecasts
December 2 - 18, 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' paintings have a vitality and immediacy that is both refreshing and unnerving. His bold images vividly capture slices of current street culture in edgy and sophisticated colour combinations.
Rhys' 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.
Rhys has recently returned from New York where he worked on a large scale mural at Volume gallery in Brooklyn, painting directly onto the walls.
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.
* excerpts from articles by Hannah Mathews , Edward Colless and Ken Wach. |
Further Information:
Helen Gory
03 95252808 0413123705
[email protected]
www.helengory.com
tues - sat 11am/6pm |
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