How do you measurement up actuality? How are you aware what’s value being actual? Is it by means of information, or your feeds? Emotions? Do you depend upon another person to inform you? Medication? Do you not even care what’s actual anymore, so long as you get what’s yours?
I’m at all times interested in how others do it, largely as a result of I’ve bother getting a grip on issues as they’re. I’ve a tough time believing the underlying substance of existence is solely “what it is,” versus “what can be” or “what it isn’t.” In Marta Lee’s solo present at Teppeto Volante in Gowanus (aka the Venice of Brooklyn), I discovered a measure for actuality that had by no means occurred to me to strive earlier than: portray.
Lee makes nonetheless lifes. She composes objects into tableaux, then paints them: a file cowl, artwork provides, knitwear, tins of sweet. Her objects are likely to stack on prime of each other within the compositional aircraft. The visible density evokes a diagrammatic high quality, as if the works perform like blueprints for a building of some variety. Given the non-public high quality of the objects, I can’t assist however think about that Lee is constructing an ark of her personal, one portray at a time.
Left: Marta Lee, “Rainbow (Around Her Neck)” (2024), acrylic, crayon, and graphite on linen over canvas; proper: Marta Lee, “Prisma” (2025), acrylic on linen
Traces and shapes meander into type to current issues that seem extra vernacular than schematized. Depictions of patterns, from brickwork to woven materials, rhyme greater than repeat. Simply now, I checked out Lee’s work on the gallery’s web site, to remind myself of different objects in her work. What a mistake. It strikes me instantly how totally different the colours look from what I keep in mind seeing. The colour house of the display photos are so flattened. What’s misplaced is how the colours IRL ease the viewer into the scene. The hues in actuality are much less saturated and extra harmonized along with her idiocentric brush strokes. A palette for a folks Tiepolo.
Now I remorse wanting on the photos on-line in any respect, as a result of what additionally will get misplaced is the peculiar high quality of scale Lee deploys to fascinating impact. She paints lots of the objects on the similar measurement they’re in actuality. So the receipt in “Someone More Thoughtful (Here Goes Everything)” (2021) is identical measurement as it’s in life. The impact is gone should you solely take a look at her work in your cellphone or laptop computer.
Set up view of Marta Lee: 11:11
In particular person, one will get the impression that Lee is portraying greater than mere issues, however quite a complete actuality value belonging to — one populated by what’s closest to her, figuratively and bodily talking. This closeness creates the sense that the artist is grounding herself to an existence (a world?) made much more goal by the very drive of her subjectivity, by how she intimates herself into the weave of each factor that fills the void in time and house.
However she isn’t constructing a personal actuality. The restraint she reveals in sustaining a 1:1 scale with the objects she paints suggests to me her want to place down stakes within the actuality she shares with you, me, and everybody we all know. Given the inhospitable nature of this actuality, so warped by grief, ache, and arbitrary and meaningless struggling, she doesn’t need to appear to desert it, like I do, on most days. As an alternative, she appears to be saying, with out saying something particularly, “I’m real. I belong here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Are you aware what the most effective time for world-building is? Twenty years in the past. Are you aware the second-best time? Now.
Set up view of Marta Lee, “11:11” (2025), acrylic and crayon on linen
Left: Marta Lee, “Baue Mit Mir (Box)” (2025), acrylic and crayon on linen; proper: Marta Lee, “Prospect Park Kunstkabinett” (2025), acrylic and crayon on linen
Left: Marta Lee, “I practiced the color names while she played solitaire (Day and Night)” (2024), acrylic, crayon, oil, and pastel on canvas; proper: Marta Lee, “Old and New Order (Diary)” (2024), acrylic, pastel, crayon, and oil on linen
Marta Lee: 11:11 continues at Tappeto Volante (126 thirteenth Avenue, Gowanus, Brooklyn) by means of November 2. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
