Daiga Grantina at Emalin & Paul Lee at Adams and Ollman

(Emalin, AdamsOllman)

Are we getting theme days now? Yesterday's painterly auto-satisfaction and today is fishnetted TuttleWurtz? Which ostensibly allows experimental comparison: constants can be ignored, the variables leading to data - we determine difference. For the sorting of garbage. Like, while Hesse's materiality was more organizations systems to flaunt it, Benglis's excessed itself to monuments, less organized than amassed (what Donovan would later make spectacle). Chamberlain versus Nancy Rubins. Tuttle's accumulation was painterly, made formal, pretty for the pageants. And Wurtz... Wurtz more just the treating the refuse with a dignity - combing the child's hair for picture day. And Miho Dohi's fungi amongst. And here we have two somewhere in the field, picking up the remains, assembling a late assemblage. There's a joke in here about recycling, or upcycling, or maybe just "reduce, reuse, recycle" it'll always be a different product.

See too: Paul Lee, B. Wurtz

Paul Lee at David Shelton

(link)

Composition is the stirred pot activating subterranean content. The dead drum highlights how far we've left the possibility of something, anything. Because nothing has become content.


see too: Paul Lee at Maccarone, Paul Lee at Karma

Paul Lee at Karma

(link)

Painting is a tambourine, I guess, is the point here. Imagine touching the painting, imagine beating it in 4/4. "However, Lee subverts this with a design to imply restraint and to create a sense of longing in the work. These tambourines will not be touched and will not make a sound—their potential for movement or rhythm is only possible through a pictorial plane." I guess like all handmade art eventually hung on walls, only ever now touched through gloves or sight, it is a sort of sad existence after all the grunting love of the painter stretching the canvas, rubbing it with oils, or whatever. Somebody cared once, paintings like ashtrays of that touch.


see too: Paul Lee at Maccarone

Paul Lee at Maccarone



This trope of a thing attached on the canvas - shrimps, soupcans, stickers, etc.. - the pre-ordered packaging of current-discourse. Assemblage-readymade-chic: the go-to symbol of fractured meaning in late-capital, Harrison semio-neurosis, manifold course nebulousness of a gee-shucks consider-the-lobster-type mire.
But for all Lee’s noodling in the bogs of contemporary tropes, there’s a repressed nostalgia interned in the postmodern-chic, hinting an emotional resonance in the tacky theater carpets. Reminiscent of Richard Hawkins stapled boys, or Fecteau’s early shoeboxes, and sometimes stepping on the toes of Tom Burr; and of course FGT - A pathos embedded in the minimalist-chic, disco heavens dancing over the corpse of autonomy's box.
Lee all about towel's touch. Cinema and the faces drawn in the dark through touch, felt over carpet cinema.
Lovelorn, the word we're looking for.