December 19, 2011
Paul Lee’s work is born of a relationship between particular material forms and romantic, unspoken narratives. Towels, washcloths, lightbulbs and tambourines are humble objects that find their way into Lee’s work: things that are part of a language of our shared
experience of the world. Reconstructed and reordered with basic materials, the ‘real space’ of these objects and their properties is abstracted into an implied pictorial space that intends an expression of intimacy and vulnerability.
This exhibition at Modern Art presents a group of wall-based works derived from towels, washcloths and tambourines. Tambourines are reshaped with built extensions and painted. Towels and washcloths – the foremost raw materials in this show – are worked by hand, dyed, painted, cut and reconstructed from their bare bones to describe space and shape with line and colour.
There is an expansive family of forms in Lee’s work that is driven by associations of colours, shapes, and found and made structures. Lee’s approach is maybe more like that of a storyteller than that of a formalist. Relationships within and between works suggest emotional and representational analogies with a rhyming and rhythmic character, performing the possibility of extruding narrative and decoding meaning from allusion and tactile experience.
