like stars and years, like numerals
INSTALLATION VIEWS
INDIVIDUAL WORKS
Days go by, 2021 acrylic on mover’s blanket, 30 x 25 cm
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!, 2019 acrylic on polyester, 130 x 100 cm SOLD
to seize upon greatness, 2020 acrylic on polyester, 137 x 102 cm
There's nothing metaphysical about it, 2021 acrylic on polyester, 30 x 25 cm SOLD
Now I am quietly waiting, 2020 acrylic on canvas, 30 x 25 cm
silent, listening, 2020 acrylic, silk screen and wood block on paper, 64 x 55.5 cm
invisible the iridescent darknesses beyond, 2019 acrylic on polyester, 102 x 68.5 cm
like stars and years, like numerals, 2021 acrylic on United airplane blanket, 50 x 40 cm SOLD
PRESS RELEASE
“My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.”
— Frank O’Hara
A man perches on a bed, holding a guitar. Fabric billows around him, pictures on the wall fade from view. He sits still and mute, frozen in an opening chord perhaps for decades. The title of this painting could be a song — harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! — but if this man sings, we can’t hear him.
Hung across the wall, enveloped by the same chalky yellow fog: a woman in period clothing. Her dress is festooned by a bow; her contorted pose strains against its propriety. She’s modelled after a William Merritt Chase painting from 1915, a woman playing a piano, but familiar details have been erased, the colour palette bleached out into something otherworldly. Her awkward silhouette, the swishing of fabric reverberate, echo across a century. Like the man with the guitar, this image feels retrieved from a formative memory, from somewhere deep in the mind.
like stars and years, like numerals is an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Lee Welch. Made within the last three years, these works record the passing of time (“days go by”, reads the title of one) and the unsung leisure activities which shape and add texture to our lives. In There’s nothing metaphysical about it, tennis players forever swing rackets in a mirage of pinks and greens, pulsating with life and yet captured here in a moment of stillness. In invisible the iridescent darknesses beyond, a woman sits at a writing bureau, licking an envelope in perpetuity. Who is she writing to? We’ll never read her handwritten note, just as we’ll never hear the guitar man sing, hear the swishly-dressed woman strike keys on her piano.
Like the poetic fragments that title them, these paintings hint at a greater whole, at the just-beyond-reach. Welch makes quiet, cryptic allusions to the history of art and literature, but recasts them in his distinct aesthetic universe. Though often jubilant, there is an underlying sense of longing or remove. Two works are painted on travel blankets (one from a United Airlines flight), hinting at movement, transience, dislocation. Faces fade from view, but evocative surface details are plucked out and thrust into the fore: the pattern of a waistcoat or a wallpaper transport us to the scene, root us in the personal, the intimate, but never tell us the full story.
Text by Rosa Abbott
With support from the Arts Council and the Arts Office Cork City Council.
