Rhys Lee: Molten Birth

I. The Journey

Making art is a journey. In Rhys Lee’s case this is true in both a figurative and literal sense. As this tome attests, Lee has travelled widely. But it is in his art that the real journey has been undertaken. Lee traverses emotional states as though they were continents to be discovered and colonised. His is a safari through states of the mind and the heart; a Lonely Planet guide authored by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Lee’s passport is stamped with a variety of exotic locales; he has been to Anger, he has stopped over in Love, he has traversed the landscape of Fear and, jet-lagged, he has experienced the Delirium of insomnia.

Like all adventurous travellers, Lee is a voyeur of the unknown. As this book opens we see him astride in alien locales, sheltering in a snow-capped tent in Scandinavia, peering over a swimming pool in a sweltering Havana. And there, early in his travels, are the first tentative sketches, faces – whether faces in the street or self-portraits is nary an issue; in many ways all of Lee’s work are self-portrayal. In 1999, the eyes stare out, Klimt-like, a mixture of defiance and trepidation. That same year, Lee discovers his trademark harshly-cropped skull in Haircut (1999). By 2000 the die is cast in a more assured self-portrait complete with sketchbook, a portrait of the artist as a young man.

But the self-assurance that Lee would soon find took time. Lee studied visual arts in Brisbane from the mid- to late ’90s and specialised in graphic design. Painting per se was in crisis and Lee had been torn between the anal-retentive nature of graphics and the anarchic explosion of graffiti. His second solo exhibition, in Melbourne in 2000, Stealing by Finding, captured this crisis with an intense assemblage of ‘stolen’ or, as he put it, “found” detritus. There were powerful suggestions of the graffiti and skateboard cultures around him, but simultaneously a clear nod to the Arte Povera and Constructivist movements. It was anarchy under a tightly imposed grid, a contradiction in materials and structure complete with Malevich (or arguably John Nixon) crosses and de-wheeled skateboards.

This conceptual phase would not last long. In the same year he exhibited at the independent, artist-run space Rubyayre in Sydney where his distinctive line-work took hold. Utilising deep reds in crude figurative lines there were already hints of the phantasmagoria that would soon follow. Like his contemporary, Adam Cullen, there was a clear disdain for traditional aesthetic pleasure and a clear delight in the potency of mark-making to inspire unease.

But, as with most things Lee does, his career path was somewhat unconventional. Fleeing what he describes as the “crazy graffiti culture” he had fallen into in Brisbane in 1999 he moved to Melbourne where he met the owners of the ultra-hip fashion outlet Fat 52 who opened their first store in Johnston Street, Fitzroy and soon expanded to Chapel Street, Prahran and beyond. Initially Lee’s work graced the walls of the outlets. Then the Fat 52 team collaborated with Helen Gory Gallerie for an exhibition for Melbourne Fashion Week, which featured Lee and led to Gory offering him an exhibition in 2000.

Showing each year, Lee’s reputation grew apace. By 2003 he was taking no prisoners with two solo exhibitions. It was Capital Hill Rooting King at the RMIT Gallery that caused a major stir that went far beyond art circles. With an energy that was palpable Lee attacked the walls of the gallery with mischievous glee, creating an environ of morphine-like visions and nightmarish hallucination. Claws raked the walls, sharpened teeth gnawed through the plaster. Garish reds and oranges clashed nauseatingly with repugnant greens as though the ghosts of the damned were vomiting up their anguish. Art curators and street kids alike stood in disturbed silence, seriously wondering about the artist’s sanity.

Perhaps haunted by his own macabre visions, Lee fled for New York, settling in to work in Brooklyn. But Gotham only fuelled his penchant for the abject. Showing at Volume Gallery in New York and Helen Gory Gallerie and the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne in 2004, Lee was working at a frenzied pace. His massive monochromatic wall work in Manhattan – Squad of Crack – continued his venting of Goya-esque monstrosities and Guernica-like graphic hysteria.

On his return from New York, Lee settled into an airy studio in Northcote. It was there that, alongside his penchant for graphically rigorous line-work, that he began to blur and soften his crazed figures, forcing the paint to emulate the fuzzed effect of graffiti spray. It was a potent move, making his grotesqueries almost palatable and inadvertently making them even more accessible to collectors and curators alike. Lee had updated Peter Booth’s nightmares for a skateboard generation.

This move inspired a period of almost pure abstraction exhibited in Twinkles Twinkle in Melbourne in 2005.

II. No Compromise

Despite, or perhaps because of, Lee’s refusal to compromise, by 2005 he had become the hot ticket in Australian art, prompting Australian Art Collector magazine to feature a defiant-looking Lee on their cover.

The accompanying article by well-respected critic Edward Colless, took a strong biographical turn, describing Lee’s early days as a pot-smoking, beer swilling slacker and his shift into a far healthier lifestyle in the new millennium.

But, as Colless accurately notes, if Lee was living a healthier lifestyle, “his paintings aren’t healthy things at all.”

“… if the carnivalesque antics of their inhabitants resembles happiness, then it’s a state of euphoria fuelled by stupefying or enraging intoxicants and otherworldly possession,” Colless wrote. “Fun at the brink of mania. Take a look at the loopy, twitchy angels and suave demons posing, lounging, snarling and snapping in his paintings and you’ll see a demi-monde crew that are more at home in a cannibalistic orgy or a psychedelic nightmare than at a health spa.”

While Colless felt the need to concentrate on Lee’s larrikin past and tagging exploits, the artist had well and truly moved on from his adolescent origins. He may have continued to be informed by the sense of urgency that tagging and graffiti require, but he had gone well beyond the essentially superficial nature of much street art. The urgency now was to grasp a visceral sense of emotion. This was more than proven by Lee’s next exhibition, the powerful and haunting Pinkeye in 2006. Here Lee introduced a new figure to his cavalcade of mutants, one that would become an iconographic totem in his work, the bowed blue man I shall dub the Golem.

The most famous Golem narrative invokes the 16th century Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, who created a golem to defend the Prague ghetto of Josefov from Anti-Semitic attacks. Made from clay, the golem was animated by either slipping a word on paper or calfskin parchment into the golem’s mouth or inscribing one of the names of God on its forehead, writing the word Emet (“truth” in Hebrew). By erasing the first letter, aleph, in Emet to form Met (“dead” in Hebrew) or by removing the slip of paper from the mouth of the golem, the creature could be returned to inanimate clay.

But, of course, there comes a night when the golem goes berserk, destroying all in its path. With its smudged features and tragic bearing, Lee’s Golem is a deeply haunted, and haunting, figure.

Writing on the Pinkeye works, curator Alison Kubler stated: “These are undeniably fun paintings in a carnivalesque, weird way. An experiment in good taste gone slightly awry.” *

Intriguingly both Colless and Kubler made use of the term ‘carnivalesque,’ a term first used by the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin when referring to the disruption of dominant stylistic traits via the injection of pure chaos. Bakhtin related the carnivalesque to the medieval festival, the Feast of Fools, in which the sub-deacons of the church would burlesque sacred ceremonies, effectively unleashing the barbarian beneath the robes.

Pink is of course a dangerous and cloying colour loaded with feminine connotations, a colour of thumb-sucking, girly crèches. In Lee’s work it takes on the feel and tonality of diluted blood. With his title, Pinkeye, Lee is referencing the gory viral or bacterial eye infection Conjunctivitis (somewhat aptly given the at times humourous edge to his work, Pinkeye was also the title of the seventh episode of South Park).

But Lee’s pinks also highlight the fact that his work, despite or perhaps because of its weirdness, is essentially autobiographical. Lee grew up in a flamingo-pink hued house in the Brisbane suburb of Ipswich. “Every painting I do has that pink in it,” he has said. “I always use colours that [have to] work really hard with each other. They may not feel comfortable together, but I try and make them.” **

Despite his dramatic rise to fame and clear commercial success, Lee was restless, feeling to some degree compromised by the pressure to produce work for an ever-growing clientele. By this stage Lee was showing with Helen Gory in Melbourne, Tim Olsen in Sydney, Art Galleries Schubert on the Gold Coast and had been taken on by Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane. His next show in 2006 would re-cement his reputation as something of an enfant terrible and return him to earlier days of maverick experimentation.

III. The Shaman Emerges

In what may be seen as a knee-jerk reaction, or alternatively a creative lightening strike, Gaggedfix in Melbourne in 2006 was a clear leap into the unknown. Lee concocted a shamanistic tee pee, a distorted pyramid, a Reich-ian orgone box. Coating the structure in hand-cut, triangle-shaped MDF boards to create a weird exoskeleton, he retained his established palette of oddly disturbing reds and pinks, turning the gallery into a pyrotechnic insanitorium, a psychotic funhouse complete with grinning John Wayne Gacy clowns. In feel Gaggedfix had more in common with the works of such ‘grunge’ artists as Hany Armanious, Mikala Dwyer or Nick Mangan, essentially throwing his commercial audience off-kilter with its exuberant symbolism and paganistic air of ritual and shelter.

Writing on Lee’s work during this period, Carmel Dwyer noted that: “The ghostly, dreamy quality of many of his images speaks directly and ironically to the ephemeral quality of our notion of self. The overriding quality of the work, however, is a lightness of touch and a sense that all could dissolve and disperse in just a few moments.” ***

Lee spent the next several months in New York, Paris and Berlin, scouring the cities for ongoing inspiration. A curious sketch from this period, titled Coastal People () allows a glimpse into the dark visions the artist was experiencing. It is a strange, almost cute panda figure, except for the fact that her nipples are bleeding. This simple sketch offers an insight into the mind that would produce the body of work for Snake at Tim Olsen Gallery in 2007.

Snake presented a small army of weirdly truncated and amputated forms. Panicked or despairing eyes stared out of the canvases in a gathering of the dispossessed. At times the hues of his by now well-established palette were diluted to a point where the figuration was reduced to semi-abstract, ghost-like forms, like ectoplasmic souls of the damned. To be sure this was the same world as his 2003 exhibition at RMIT, but in the four years between the shows Lee had fine-tuned his visions in brilliantly unsettling ways. More than one viewer at his opening made comparisons to Edvard Munch’s 1893 masterpiece The Scream.

The hollow sockets of the eyes, the gaping, silent mouths, the melting flesh, the hints of simians, skulls and snakes, all coalesced into a deeply disturbing phantasmagoria.

IV. Head Space

By now a clear pattern had emerged in Rhys Lee’s working practice. He would spend months holed up in his studio, working furiously to vent his demons. He would then hold an exhibition that would almost invariably sell-out on opening night, and then head for the airport. In 2007 he returned to New York before heading to Los Angeles and Mexico. This was a trip of deserts and music, the antithesis of being trapped in the studio and clearly allowed the head-space to concoct yet another variation on his core theme: the tortured and tormented figure.

Rhys Lee’s bronze heads were first unleashed in Melbourne in late 2007 at the Helen Gory Gallerie. The medium he had chosen leant the works an ageless quality as though they had been resurrected from some ancient cavern in which they had been interred. These were warriors and shaman from some ancient Celtic story, pagans all, they stared from their plinths, some malevolent, others playful, all unnervingly life-sized. Clearly Mexico’s Day of the Dead played a role here. The sense of ritual was palpable as they glared and stared from their golden-hued plinths.

Where his previous body of paintings seemed to float, Lee’s bronzes were clearly adhered to Terra in their physical weight. Some smoked noxious hallucinogens from gnarled pipes, others were born with bat-like ears.

Lee’s drawings of this time clearly take their queue from Peter Booth, an artist Lee admires. But if anything they were darker than Booth’s own stygian sketches. These are portraits of demons from the lowest depths, the stuff of nightmares, the offspring of Satan via Goya.

Lee was working at a furious rate, preparing for three shows in 2008. He simultaneously prepared a massive body of work to be divided between Brisbane and Sydney while finding time to visit Japan and hold an exhibition of works on paper in New York. His works on paper show in Ludlow Street featured faces that he had seen on the streets of a dark Gotham, a Nosferatu-like homeless man hunched in a black jacket, a swarthy and bald African- American, all of them clearly damned.

Still restless he headed down to Cuba where the political graffiti gave him a frisson of the past with his own graffiti days.

Ripple People, which was held at Jan Murphy Gallery, was the first clear indication of the influence of Sidney Nolan on Lee’s work. Nolan had executed a number of washed out, semi-featureless figures, perhaps in turn inspired by Joy Hester’s extraordinarily melancholic portraits. Nolan’s works of this genre made use of jarring colouration, which Lee also adopted, rendering his faces with green skin and slashes of crimson for eyes and mouth. Elsewhere faces stare out of flesh rendered in pasty grays or corpse-like blues.

Ripple People was followed by an even darker show at Tim Olsen’s, which had the air of work from another century, a fin de siècle sensibility that was clearly at odds with the fast track life around him.

V. The Unnamable

Rhys Lee claims he doesn’t have nightmares. That is probably understandable. By the time he hits the sack after a long day of painting his night terrors have been expelled, forcibly ejaculated from his subconscious to come to eerie life on his canvases.

The exhibitions in Brisbane and Sydney were not for the faint-hearted. They haunted the viewer long after their initial encounter, floating like some dark ectoplasm in the back of the memory, seared onto the retina like some astonishing vision from a dark somnambulistic universe, brought into our world by inexplicable means.

The works seemed to stir the imagination in ways akin to a powerful ghost story by the fire. Despite their evident physicality, the sinuous brush strokes, the tactile, visceral mix of paint, they seemed to float in an unearthly ether. A part of this was, of course, pure technique. Lee was approaching his paintings with both an unorthodox palette and anarchistic spontaneity. He was coating his perfect linen in deep stygian blacks and then working his way into the darkness to free his subjects. Odd metallics shimmered and stirred within the surface. Colours that should never be seen side by side seemed to embrace, creating a bizarre alchemical brew that, even in the dark, seemed to step outside the realm of paint into the room, pursuing the viewer for causes unknown.

In many ways these works presented a rogues gallery. Lee refuses to name these ‘portraits’ – perhaps giving them a name would bring them further into this world, giving them a soul. A name may give them too much power, enough that they would finally step through the portal, move beyond the frame.

But it is tempting to place them more distinctly in our world. We might spy Lazarus or the golem, a figure from Goya’s Disasters of War or the vampire Lestat. The figure with the frosted, silvery hair and haunted eyes could be a scientist from John Carpenter’s deeply creepy 1982 film The Thing. Lee isn’t that specific, but there is an iconographic sensibility to these figures; somehow we know them, they are the creatures of the universal deep subconscious.

Many of these works were created in a tumultuous outpouring in a studio in Ludlow Street, New York. Anyone who has lived in Manhattan for any amount of time will also recognise these figures; they haunt the alleyways and street corners, they shuffle the streets of Gotham homeless. They have passed over into a realm that you and I cannot begin to imagine.

Lee has never followed fashion, thus he has remained a somewhat elusive figure, difficult to pin down stylistically. However it was telling that in 2008 he was also curated into an exhibition at the University of Queensland Art Gallery titled neo goth: back in black alongside such artists as Sam Leach, Nick Mangan, Amanda Marburg, Heidi Yardley and Tony Garifalakis. The exhibition was an investigation into what the shows curator, Alison Kubler, defined as a ‘gothic’ sensibility. And Rhys Lee’s works are, indeed, deeply gothic.

‘Gothic’ seems to be one of those terms that, like some infernal virus, finds ways to be rejuvenated regardless of the times. Its origin hails back to five East Germanic tribes who caused all sorts of trouble following the fall of the Roman Empire. By the mid-12th century it was a derisive slang term referring to the spires and arches of French architecture. It morphed yet again in the 1700s as a description for literature following the release of such novels as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). By the mid- to late 1980s, Gothic was used to describe a side arm of the punk movement with such music as the existential pop of The Cure and the gritty urban-goth of The Fall which featured city hobgoblins and the Great God Pan in its lyrics.

If anything, with his devil-may-care approach, Lee’s gothicism harks back to the original Germanic tribes whose raison d’être seemed to be breaking down all structures available for sacking. Indeed, as Kubler has noted: “With outsider bravado Lee’s paintings engage with ongoing debates in contemporary art criticism about good versus bad painting; that is, you get the feeling he just doesn’t really care, which is perhaps in large part why his paintings have such a hip immediacy…” ****

Ever restless, Lee completed a frantic year with a visit to the Kunwinjku country of, Gunbalanya, in the staggering escarpment country of Arnhem Land where he encountered the often dark rock art of Injalak. To those who have not visited the region it comes as a shock of both natural and cultural change. When one crosses the East Alligator River – the border of Arnhem Land – the country, along with the time, temperature, language and spirit, changes. It is an initiation in itself and one that most city-people seem to find both exhilarating and terrifying, which was very much the case for Lee and his travelling companion, fellow artist Darren McDonald.

VI. Cavalier Carnivalesque

It is the early months of 2009 and Lee is sweltering in both summer heat and the heat of the foundry where new heads and figures are undergoing molten birth. He is frantically putting the finishing touches to a new body of work for his first showing at Karen Woodbury Gallery in Melbourne.

In many ways Everglades Cavalier is a summation of the various trails that Lee’s work has traversed since 2000. As with Gaggedfix from 2006, Lee has returned with an architectural structure to be installed in the centre of the gallery. Draped in found naval flags, this cedar cabin will act as a rural crypt, the resting place of misguided seamen, interring his odd new bronzes in glimmering darkness.

There have been other timber structures built in galleries in recent times and they find a link in terms of notions of the enclosure of memory. Michelle Ussher’s timber-gothic Helovanorak of 2008 and Ronnie van Hout’s claustrophobic self-portrait of paranoia, Sleep less of 2006 both utilised this notion of structure within structure to create highly personal time capsules. In some ways Lee will take this notion a step further, for his bronze heads, essentially self-portraits, can be seen as receptacles for the detritus of memory.

Lee’s ‘portraits’ – both bronze and painterly – in Everglades Cavalier are perhaps the most intense to date. At times heavily bearded, they sit as a cross between Merlin, Rasputin, Karl Marx and Robert F. Scott. They are toppled dictators and gnarled gnomes and buried miners. One of the most striking resembles a despairing Arctic explorer, cheeks reddened with frostbite, the eyes a dead, stygian black peering into the abyss. Elsewhere a Christ-like visage stares from the gloom or a hooded or a negroid face recalls his days in New York and the favoured adornment of graffiti artists worldwide.

But they are all, in essence, self-portraits, something the artist himself admits. “I’m always drawing heads and figures,” he said in 2007. “I can’t get away from it. There was a time when I focused on hands, but it’s been more about heads again recently. I did a show of almost abstract landscapes, but still the heads came through. It’s always about my headspace, so all this internal stuff is coming out in the shape of a head.” *****

If it is the carnivalesque that Lee is exploring, then it is a dark carnival indeed. Largely missing from his palette are the softer greens and pinks of earlier paintings, which have been subsumed by dark ultramarines and melancholic blacks. Everglades Cavalier has an air of closure, the final word before a new era of creativity and, no doubt, travel.

– Melbourne, 2009

* Alison Kubler, Rhys Lee: Pinkeye, Australian Art Collector, 2006. p. 316
** Quoted in Deanne Cheuk, Rhys Lee, Pol Oxygen, 2007. p. 88
*** Carmel Dwyer, 50 Most Collectable Artists, Australian Art Collector, 2007. p.116
**** Alison Kubler, Rhys Lee: Pinkeye, Australian Art Collector, 2006. p. 316
***** Quoted in Deanne Cheuk, Rhys Lee, Pol Oxygen, 2007. p. 88