Identity and belief, belonging and abandonment, religious iconography and art history, cross and irrigate the work of the artist Patrick Morales-Lee. These emotional vectors constitute the sensitive frame and the main narrative axes of a pictorial work where destiny and a questioning about our common humanity are woven. Inspired by popular art as much as by sacred art and contemporary fiction, Patrick Morales-Lee establishes a dialogue where the canvas becomes the reflection of our secret questions about the fascinating complexity of being.
The freelance art critic, journalist and jury member of the Galerie Heimat & NG Art Creative Residency Art Prize, Laura Gascoigne, highlights the ambivalent relationship that runs through his work. She describes his figurative paintings as “powerful, thoughtful and disturbing work, a centuries-old search for artistic truth in a contemporary style. »
These hieratic figures, motionless and alive, allow us access to the intimacy of his own life and personal experience: his arrival in a foster family at the age of three, an acute awareness of difference and the need to forge a new sense of belonging.
“The way of painting is like having a conversation with a person, you don’t know where it will take you but you know that it is by following this path that you will get there. »
This phrase by artist David Salle illustrates the bold approach of the artist where the creative process does not respond to a defined pattern; it is the result of an incessant dialogue between his will and his unconscious.
At the beginning of each painting, Patrick Morales-Lee takes photographs of people, close or unknown, who become so many painting subjects. Scenographer and cinematographer, he builds in his paintings a universe where the superposition of plans gives these faces a horizon and a temporality.
Patrick Morales-Lee’s first gesture was drawing. Appropriating pencil, charcoal and then the brush allowed him to intersect the canons of classical aesthetics and our current questions. The distinctive mark of his pictorial know-how consists in weaving conductive threads between his works, a correspondence between patterns and colors in a permanent questioning of form.
The director of the Heimat gallery, Alexandra Chiari, remarks that the work of Morales-Lee “concentrates the whole history of painting in search of the portrait, finally, and this in a radically contemporary interpretation. »
Inspired by the Renaissance period, the practice of Patrick Morales-Lee unfolds in echo of the stories and figurative representations of this period, with a style that reflects an accuracy in the sense that Ingres could say that drawing is the probity of art.
The personal exhibition of Patrick Morales-Lee, internationally awarded artist, is organized by the gallery owner Alexandra Chiari assisted by the young curator, Gabriella Beaumont and will take place at the Galerie Heimat, in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
At the same time, Morales-Lee will carry out an artistic residence at NG Art Creative Residency, at the Moulin de Gréoux, in Maussane, in Provence, directed by Nicky Ginsberg, a long-time gallerist in Sydney.
Gabriella Beaumont, curator
Patrick Morales-Lee
May 14 – June 18, 2022
Galerie Heimat
33, bd Mirabeau – 13210 St Remy de Provence
www.galerieheimat.fr
