Paul Lee’s use of everyday found objects has made room for comparison to Robert Rauschenberg’s sculptural “combines” of the 1950s. At the same time, it is possible to see Lee’s sculptures as extensions of Duchampian ready-mades. But Lee’s work has a quiet restraint to it, visually suggestive, perhaps even seductive, with hidden, almost delphinian-like messages.

The show consists of minimalist sculptures of carefully chosen materials that recall neo-Dada and pop art objects, such as soda cans and light bulbs. There are small sculptures of crushed soda cans covered with a black and white Xerox photograph of a young man’s face, with tennis balls and brightly colored lights stuck on as awkward, protruding appendages. Well-worn towels sewn together hang like geometric, abstract paintings. These frayed towels are highly charged, suggestive of intimate human interaction, absorption. A stiffened gray towel erected in the shape of an oblong rectangle calls attention to absence, a body gone where it could not fit anyway. Lee’s distinct color palette is appealing and adds layered meaning – blues become liquid, pastel pink and purple become horizon lines, white becomes lack. One of the most compelling pieces in the show is a video projection, in which a spinning record is covered fully, then partially, with the same Xerox image as the soda can sculptures. The record continues to play, dragging its needle across the image, creating an anxious tension between anticipation and contact, contact and real contact, desire and actualization.

The work resonates powerfully in Peres Projects’ main space, in which the clean, white tiled floors make the work take on a kind of bathhouse subtext. Despite covering both gallery spaces at Peres Projects, just down the street from one another, Paul Lee’s solo show takes on a kind of quiet modesty, both refreshing and illuminating.

- Hong-An Truong

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Paul Lee, Arm's Length, Marach 1 - 29, 2008; Peres Projects, Courtesy of Peres Projects, Berlin Los Angeles.  Paul Lee, Arm's Length, Marach 1 - 29, 2008; Peres Projects, Installation View, 2008, Courtesy of Peres Projects, Berlin Los Angeles.  Paul Lee, Arm's Length, Marach 1 - 29, 2008; Peres Projects, Installation View, 2008, Courtesy of Peres Projects, Berlin Los Angeles.  Paul Lee, Arm's Length, Marach 1 - 29, 2008; Peres Projects, Installation View, 2008, Courtesy of Peres, Projects Berlin Los Angeles.)