Lee Welch’s work are like inverted pictures that flip commentary inside out

“In chess, there is a word for the point at which any further move only unravels what has been built: Zugzwang,” says Lee Welch, a painter from Louisville, Kentucky at present based mostly in Dublin, Ireland. “For me, that is the moment, the recognition that adding another mark would weaken the whole. To stop is not to abandon the game, but to protect its precarious balance.”

Lee’s work are in regards to the margins of notion – how we relate to narrative, cultural reminiscence and historical past. Inspired by classical tragedies, “not to restage grand narratives but to prove how its force of fate, blindness, and recognition continue to haunt contemporary experience”, Lee’s work use detrimental area and clever mark making to inform simply sufficient of a narrative that enables the viewer to get misplaced within the imaginative prospects. They usually appear like inverted pictures – a reversal of what’s recognized – pictures that carry the foggy essence of the earlier portray.

Nothing feels maximalist or too minimal in Lee’s work. That’s as a result of Lee is making an attempt to seize “the moment when things begin to slip, when perception falters and something unexpected is revealed”, which exists in slim margins. “I don’t want to pin things down so much as to create a space where the prosaic and the profound, the past and the present, can meet in uneasy proximity,” says Lee. The most significant a part of portray, for Lee, is realizing when to cease – that Zugzwang – realizing when to guard the valuable complete as a substitute of including one other pointless mark.

The topics of his work purposefully seem informal – a tennis match, a guitarist, a recreation of chess – to open up questions in regards to the instability of that means. “ I am less interested in direct representation than in how we receive images and stories through various filters. The result is work that feels both familiar and estranged, a delicate theatre of looking,” says Lee. Mundanity turns into poetic within the stress between the viewer and narrative. The color palette in Lee’s work seem muted, washed out, faint – there’s at all times a semblance of worn out historical past that precedes the viewer’s arrival to the portray, linked solely by a strand of cultural reminiscence. Inspired by Jasper Johns’ “alchemical puzzles” and Marlene Dumas, “who proves a face is never just a face, but a silent siege”, Lee interprets reflexes towards “truly knowing” with a mature and deft creative sensibility.