Timothy Lai

Jack Barrett is pleased to present Still. Yet. Still. a solo exhibition by Timothy Lai. Iterative and enigmatic, this new body of work spirals around intrusive visions that seep into the gaps of daily thought.

Lai returns to the domestic interior as a stage for his cast of archetypes—the dog, the rabbit, an outstretched arm, a male figure. Obscuring narrative clarity, the artist calls into question both what came before and what is to follow. Within the seriality of these works, difference emerges as a crucial tool for non-narrativity. Symbolic order comes only with each iterative arrangement within Lai’s mise-en-scene; allowing a sense of foreboding to percolate amid the deferred anticipation of a resolution that will never arrive.

The penetrability of these spaces is frequently thwarted by the materiality of Lai’s painted surface. Hovering brumes of pointillist dots or cascading squalls of pulled pigment disrupt optical passage of a space; creating a surface simultaneously scanned over and seen through. On this material plane, phantom images of coalescing motifs—as in the dark green threshold of Nothing at All—only become visible optically and spatially due to the changing application of paint.

In Rabbit In Suspension 1 and 2, the figure of the rabbit epitomizes Lai’s apparitional order. The creature’s form rises from beneath to the surface like a palimpsest (itself applied over progenitive work by Rembrandt, Francis Bacon or Chaim Soutine). Abstraction takes hold as boundaries between figure and ground, held ever-so delicately by the turn of a brush, nearly fade away.

As legibility decays along with the rabbit, Lai encourages the viewer to embrace the unsettling breakdown in semiotics. We are asked to sit with the instability of what we know, what we see and what we are experiencing. As seen in Lai’s use of greens, this color range compounds the interstitial quality of this work. The colors, fluctuating between a symbol of toxicity and rebirth, situates these paintings in the uncanny space between pain and pleasure.

Still. Yet. Still. places us with uncertain futures, undecided presents, and lingering pasts. In this temporal space, Lai’s work asserts a living with, and within, a world without resolution.

—Devon Zimmerman, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Ogunquit Museum of American Art

Timothy Lai (b. Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia) lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. He received his BA in Communication from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and his MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Towards a Blue Room, Josh Lilley, London (2024); The Armory Show, Jack Barrett, New York (2023); Double Wall, Jack Barrett, New York (2023); Don't Let The Sun Go Down on Me, Pa, Longlati Foundation, Shanghai (2022). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; White Cube, Hong Kong, China; Green Family Foundation, Dallas, TX, and more. Lai's work has been written about and reviewed in publications including, The Wall Street Journal, Juxtapoz, Artsy and Office Magazine.