Li Lin Lee at E.M. Donahue - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Of Chinese coming down Indonesian birth and American education, Li Lin to leeward trained as a biochemist. A Chicago resident for the last decade, he freshly had his fifth solo painting present to view at Donahue - work involving multiplication, shifting and layering that might be seen as analogous to the complexity of his have history. All the works in this "Casa de Amor" series consist of mixed-mediums-on-burlap panels of 16 by dint of 12 or 40 by 30 inches. In Casa de Amor VIII, 16 small panels make up a single work, on the other hand more often the panels are independent. They are hung in pairs or in collections of various sizes that vary from individual exhibition to another at the discretion of each gallery's staff. Here, as it happens, the configurations were decided by means of the artist himself.

greatest in quantity panels bear a single emblematic shape - figure eight, concentric circle, kidney shape, vase shape, of greece cross, radiating lines - on the other hand that doesn't mean that plane this basic unit of Lee's work is simple. He has heavily painted and repainted each canvas, accumulating a history for which pentimento is too delicate a term; it's more like topographic strata, a landscape of remains. Buried colors reassert themselves, especially around the cutting sides of the canvas.

Because of the nearness of palpable and polychrome spirits each panel, even the simplest, is not quite anchored in space or in time. Each motif appears to be a veil hanging in forehead of another, which could be swept away with the artist's nearest impulse. But here, too, the consequence is more forceful than individual might expect. Lee uses a wide range of tints many of them saturated, in combinations that nearly always involve athletic contrasts. This emphatic color, combined with the thick weft gives the works a muscular character, an invigorating coarseness.

to leeward formerly painted on board, applying layers of imagery with stencils and then sanding parts or rubbing things away with paint remover The finished work was flat except for certain textured patches, among which single might find thin and tangled lines. the couple the reality and the appearance were close tightlyed and flattened. The new work is just the opposite in its extensive layering and abundance of brushwork. at the same time it has a graphic impact rather than conveying a faculty of perception of illusionistic depth; whatever dimension it insinuates projects into the viewer's space. The fresh work sometimes creates an appearance of surface motion like that of the whirling stripes upon rotating barber poles.

This was Lee's last present to view of grouped panels; he intends to paint solitary individual canvases from now upon But here the smallest and simplest panels were the greatest in quantity compelling, and their interest was amplified through provocative juxtapositions. So the question becomes: can to leeward maintain his dazzling combination of immediacy and mysteriousness in a solo canvas?

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