Relaispunkt.1 presents Postscript: Field Notes an exhibition of works by the multidisciplinary artist Jet Le Parti. Postscript: Field Notes opens February 16th, 2024 and will be on view through March 1, 2024. The opening event will feature performances by a blend of Brooklyn-based sound artists. This is Le Parti’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The works gathered in Postscript: Field Notes serve as a pictorial review of Jet Le Parti's recent explorations into historical sites across Europe, America, and the Middle East. Moody, resistant to formalist cliches, and intrinsically critical, the gestural symbologies embedded in these works touch on something like a dehumanized anthropology. Each work caricatures the perspectives inherent in the ongoing legacy of Western appropriation of historical narratives, while also speaking to a more holistic portrayal of political realities.
Le Parti’s soi-disant technique of 'scratchitti', which leans on a poetry of nihilist cipher, incorporates quotidian materials, like house paint, graphite, and ink to describe a kind of anti-natural emanation from anarchic expressivity toward fixed figurative forms. His work teases out a subject position beholden to laws of history and economics, while also bodying forth archival, haptic, and anthropologically-based improvisations—sculptural mosaics glimpsed on the wing of exploration and travel, shot through with remembrances of place, character, and identity.
In the artist’s own words: "The best efforts of any being, in its pursuit to express what it is and what it was—to leave its mark—essentially amounts, when scaled out, to nothing more than minor marks and etches on the walls of strange and soon-to-be-unseen surfaces, as time progresses.” Works like Archilochus & Defense Mechanisms (2023) do this statement justice. Here, the grid-like strategy of mark-making takes on an almost devotional turn, incorporating the nervous rhythms of the artist’s hand as it scrawls a cross-like signature on the surface of a canvas. Similarly, works like On Phenomenology: I (2023) are fragmented by the ubiquity of the digital turn. What was formerly lived is now only experienced through an agglomeration of chalk-like lines, a virtual signature where time appears geometric, fixed.
Postscript: Field Notes confronts viewers with the more unseemly traces of immaterial labor, vestiges of historicity that stain the tangible materials Le Parti has conscientiously gathered. In a thrown-together way, his assemblages have more claim to unity than the various ideologies they speak to, vie with, vomit back, and all too reluctantly represent. Through the ambiguous lens of politicized portals, Le Parti uniquely captures ephemeral beings, gestures, which, even in the wake of their collapse, have enlivened the world by the sin of their existence.
Jet Le Parti (b.1998) is an American artist known for his deeply introspective poetic and painterly works. His formative years in a small military town in the American South were marked by isolation and racial tensions, fostering a critical eye and a penchant for cultural paradoxes. His relocation to vibrant urban centers like Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Berlin has exposed him to a broad spectrum of cultural narratives and perspectives, profoundly shaping his artistic voice. His experiences across Europe, America, and the Middle East, along with their exhibitionism of exhumed historical sites and the ongoing exchange and profit from these cultural treasures, provided a complex backdrop for Le Parti to delve into the intricacies of Western recontextualization of history as part of a "collective" narrative, complicating the pursuit of authentic self-expression. Le Parti's self-education in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience has provided him with a robust theoretical framework to explore the conceptual and existential themes prevalent in his work. His involvement with the underground avant-garde gallery project, Base 36, has been instrumental in shaping his understanding of the role of art in society.
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Given the unique nature of the project, viewing this exhibition will be possible by appointment/RSVP scheduling only. To arrange a viewing, or to attend our opening event, please get in touch with us at: email@relaispunkt.one. or utilize our scheduling system above.
