John Lees

Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to present John Lees, Krazy Paradise. This is the artists seventh solo show with the gallery.

When choosing the spelling of the title for this exhibition, Krazy Paradise, John Lees echoes Marlena Dietrich’s German accented voice from the song Illusions (performed in the film Foreign Affair). Regardless of the origin, Lees’ Krazy Paradise moves us into his private universe with a laugh.

His paintings characteristically have a double meaning – one personal, one universal. From the beginning, although beginnings are long for Lees, he concentrated on the old stuffed chair, the quiet pond, the ripples, the footed bathtub, the hills, or his first home in Denville NJ. Basically monoliths, but monoliths we found familiar. Each monolith is endowed with memories (the artist’s as well as our own). Portraits, often self-portraits, are always part of his focus. And whether landscape or bathtub or portrait, each would be worked and reworked, with dates on the back documenting each reentry.

Turning specifically to the 16 paintings and 7 drawings featured in Krazy Paradise, one cannot help but think that the more things change, the more they stay the same (Camus). In fact, several of these selected paintings are indeed pre-existing works, some greatly changed and others only slightly.

Now, feelings are more intense as the paint is freer and colors are high. In Large Landscape a miniscule figure is enveloped by grand hills. In Profile or Man in an Armchair, there is a new intensity to the color. Surfaces are sanded down and the delineation - sometimes vague as in Old Mountebank and other times more stylized as in Cabeau - revealing an unreal world with real feeling shared by the artist and his audience.