Morales-Lee
Patrick Morales-Lee was taught by the painter John Virtue, his work is held in a number of private collections, including the permanent collection of Soho House.
"Strong, thoughtful and unsettling work.
An age-old search for artistic truth, in modern dress."
Laura Gascoigne, Arts critic and commentator
_________________________________________________
Morales-Lee’s paintings explore memory, family and belonging, and the things we carry without always knowing why. Interested in how the past hangs around, how stories shift and memories blur, he considers how identity is shaped by the people, experiences and histories that precede us.
Recent works mark a transition from drawing into painting, extending the immediacy of line into a more expansive engagement with colour, surface, gesture and erasure. Figures function less as portraits than as structures, occupying spaces between observation and recollection. Recurring female forms, familial relationships and versions of the artist himself become a way of exploring identity as something connected, inherited and continually reconstructed.
The repeated and sometimes conjoined figures suggest identities that overlap rather than remain singular, connecting ideas of heritage, genealogy and the ways experiences, characteristics and histories are passed between generations. The use of his own image provides a point of entry, but the figures move beyond autobiography, becoming vehicles for thinking about how individual identity sits within a larger familial and cultural history.
Resisting fixed narratives, the paintings develop through ambiguity, fragmentation and repetition. Images are built up, pulled apart and obscured; figures shift between presence and absence, recognition and uncertainty. The surfaces hold traces of what came before, with meaning emerging through the physical process of painting itself.
Rooted in personal experience but not confined by it, the work explores how we become ourselves, and how much of that self is made from what came before us.