Rhys Lee "Rims and Kwows Pits"

Rhys Lee

“Rims & Kwows Pits”

Official Opening Friday August 12^th 2005

Distinctly edgy and elegant, the “Rims & Kwows Pits” paintings are electrifying in their minimalist, high-keyed intensity. Culled from the shades of an urban existence and its graffiti culture, Rhys Lee’s deceptively ‘raw’ images speak a sophisticated, pictorial language honed by a degree in graphic design and an abiding interest in art history. Communicating with the same brevity, immediacy and persuasiveness required to market products or ideologies, Lee’s canvases deliver ... and at a billboard scale!

Coupling spontaneity and deliberation, Rhys Lee delights in absurdity and the play between over-charged gestural strokes, shapes and colours. His works take time to unfold, for their meanings are deliberately elusive, even fugitive. The “Rims & Kwows Pits” denizens appear to posture and flit as though released from the nether zones of Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’ or an Hieronymous Bosch landscape. Blank-eyed and saw-toothed, their carnivalesque antics engender humour as much as alarm. Lee maintains that his demi-mode imagery and its nonsensical titles are of neither social nor political significance. In the manner of the early surrealist poets and painters, they result from pleasing conjunctive sounds and automatic mark-making, or as Lee likes to term – “good mistakes”. Arbitrarily selected, exaggerated and then simplified, the figurative motifs are reassembled across the picture plane to project a new reality - that of the pure aesthetic experience!

With very subtle tonal changes, splotches, sprays, dribbles and drips, Lee dismantles object definition and spatial continuity. Freed from fixed-point perspective and representational considerations, Rhys Lee’s canvases evoke intense visual pleasure by appealing directly to the senses. A superb colourist, his pastel-pale harmonies are jolted from complacency by abrupt colour shifts and aberrant ‘fluro’ juxtapositions. Each pictorial component is designed to transmit through its size, intensity and placement and in this seemingly effortless distillation of the visual elements, Lee achieves a lyrical fluency which is so seductive that it masks the irony of his intent.

Trained in Brisbane, Rhys Lee has a BVA Graphic Design, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University 1997. He has lived and worked in Melbourne for the past five years, with hugely successful solo shows in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Rhys Lee has a very impressive bibliography which includes multiple editorials in Black & White Magazine, Oyster Magazine, Belle Magazine and the prestigious Australian Art Collector Magazine. Rhys Lee and his paintings are the COVER STORY for the current issue (no.33) of Australian Art Collector Magazine.

JACQUELINE HOUGHTON