How do you size up reality? How do you know what is worth being real? Is it through news, or your feeds? Feelings? Do you depend on someone else to tell you? Drugs? Do you not even care what’s real anymore, as long as you get what’s yours?
I’m always curious about how others do it, largely because I have trouble getting a grip on things as they are. I have a hard time believing the underlying substance of existence is simply “what it is,” as opposed to “what can be” or “what it isn’t.” In Marta Lee’s solo show at Teppeto Volante in Gowanus (aka the Venice of Brooklyn), I found a measure for reality that had never occurred to me to try before: painting.
Lee makes still lifes. She composes objects into tableaux, then paints them: a record cover, art supplies, knitwear, tins of candy. Her objects tend to stack on top of one another in the compositional plane. The visual density evokes a diagrammatic quality, as if the works function like blueprints for a construction of some kind. Given the personal quality of the objects, I can’t help but imagine that Lee is building an ark of her own, one painting at a time.
Lines and shapes meander into form to present things that appear more vernacular than schematized. Depictions of patterns, from brickwork to woven fabrics, rhyme more than repeat. Just now, I looked at Lee’s work on the gallery’s website, to remind myself of other objects in her paintings. What a mistake. It strikes me immediately how different the colors look from what I remember seeing. The color space of the screen images are so flattened. What is lost is how the colors IRL ease the viewer into the scene. The hues in reality are less saturated and more harmonized with her idiocentric brush strokes. A palette for a folk Tiepolo.
Now I regret looking at the images online at all, because what also gets lost is the peculiar quality of scale Lee deploys to interesting effect. She paints many of the objects at the same size they are in reality. So the receipt in “Someone More Thoughtful (Here Goes Everything)” (2021) is the same size as it is in life. The effect is gone if you only look at her work on your phone or laptop.
In person, one gets the impression that Lee is portraying more than mere things, but rather an entire reality worth belonging to — one populated by what is closest to her, figuratively and physically speaking. This closeness creates the sense that the artist is grounding herself to an existence (a world?) made even more objective by the very force of her subjectivity, by how she intimates herself into the weave of every thing that fills the void in time and space.
But she isn’t building a private reality. The restraint she shows in maintaining a 1:1 scale with the objects she paints suggests to me her desire to put down stakes in the reality she shares with you, me, and everyone we know. Given the inhospitable nature of this reality, so warped by grief, pain, and arbitrary and meaningless suffering, she doesn’t want to seem to abandon it, like I do, on most days. Instead, she seems to be saying, without saying anything in particular, “I’m real. I belong here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Do you know what the best time for world-building is? Twenty years ago. Do you know the second-best time? Now.
Marta Lee: 11:11 continues at Tappeto Volante (126 13th Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn) through November 2. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
