"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. This is then followed by the act of doing - drawing and painting" *
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. Rather than seeing mechanical magnifications of loose freehand figures, we see their forms distended, dilated and augmented.
Lee has retained the structure and principles intrinsic to design and combined these with the energy and immediacy of graffiti art. These two disciplines have been merged 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.... The line is what Lee asks you to read, not the expression. The combinations of colour is what he wants you to get, not their meaning."
* Hannah Mathews, Curator, Ian Potter at Federation Square
|
