On Lee Welch, Oedipus

by Diana Bamimeke

Sight, the sibling of knowledge, the destination of endless human questioning; sight, the anticipation of clarity, the peril, the downfall, the dispersal, the disappearance.

The matter of sight sits at the centre of Lee Welch’s show, Oedipus. Given its oblique title, one expects incestuous subject matter: scenes of mother-son hysterics à la Psycho, portraits of dejected boys and men distant from their mothers, so unmoored in the world, playing out dynamics that Freud might have delighted in theorising. With painting, print, and installation, Welch transforms The Complex’s gallery space into a cradle of contemplation. Eight canvases hang serenely on all four sides of the space and on a specially-installed pale pink plasterboard wall, right-angled and fanning out from the entrance. Interiors, memories, and real and fictional people figure in muted acrylics, in washed-out tones drained of chromatic charge. As such, the scenes seem only half-remembered, wavering in and out of sight.  

Shortly before Oedipus opened, I’d finished artist and author Jenny Odell’s thoughtful book-length treatise, How To Do Nothing (2019), on the imperative of resisting the attention economy. The demand for contemplative attention in art and life felt like a shared concern between Welch and Odell. In the book, Odell describes the difference between automatic, physiological perceptions of the world around us and attention itself. We receive the former easily, but a new encounter or an unfamiliar sensation must activate the latter. For Odell, an evening performance of a John Cage piece attunes her ears to the sounds of her neighbourhood environment, which she hears daily but never listens to. In my case, it is Welch’s painting all at once (2025). I see it first upon entering the space, acting as my “key” into the wider meaning implied by the exhibition’s title. In the painting, a pair of hands grasp the taupe face of Paul Atreides, thumbs pressing into both eye sockets; a reference to the science fiction film franchise Dune and its protagonist. The practice of blinding in this painting mirrors the self-afflicted blindness that Oedipus the King, another famous protagonist, inflicts in the last pages of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex. Against the advice of his mother-wife Jocasta and the blind prophet Tiresias, Oedipus forges ahead to discover the true circumstances of his birth and his marriage. A shameful insight that results in his violent injury and eventual exile. Full sight isn’t guaranteed to Atreides, Oedipus or indeed the viewer in their encounter with Welch’s work. In each instance, the tension of incomplete perception is something that must be reckoned with, rather than avoided.

I turn my own attention to the rest of the exhibition and its questions of the uncertainty of seeing. In this space of uncertainty, how much room is granted falsehoods that appear like reality? The tourists in all silently concentrating (2025) opt for such falsehoods, each posing comically as if holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The absurd performance figures barely on the canvas: each body is reduced to almost the minimum number of brushstrokes that might be used to suggest a human presence. The image here brims with the possibility of total evaporation into the negative space of the painting, as if only briefly dredged from the subconscious. Preoccupied with—or “concentrating” on—the trompe-l’oeil gimmick at the heart of this kind of holiday photo, the tourists don’t notice their own vanishing materiality. It’s a microcosm of the culture of distractibility Odell sharply criticises in her book, one that, in the end, will only produce “not understanding, but a dull and stupefying dread”. These characters are absorbed in the confection of this shared world, chillingly unaware of the fates of the other fading subjects in Oedipus.

The concern with disappearance continues throughout Oedipus. Across from the tourists is the plasterboard wall, on which four paintings hang: all is vanity (2025), the smallest daily chore can be humanised (2025), epochal defining while one creates beautiful problems (2025) and all at once. While the paintings do hold my attention, it is this wall that takes up a significant portion of it. It is enormous, nursery-pink and unfinished. The seams where individual panels meet are covered up with white paint, forming angled capillaries that cross in and out behind the paintings. It looks like something you’d see on a show about cowboy builders, and when the curator points out the narrow wooden beams above supporting either side of the wall, this impression solidifies further. This wall, cribbed mid-completion from the kind of domestic space that a motherly figure like Jocasta might occupy, teeters on the edge of collapse. Unfortunately, the person depicted in epochal has already succumbed: Vasyl Ivanchuk, the Ukrainian chess grandmaster, is doubled over in shame, having just lost a match. Though not as brutally self-effacing as Oedipus the King, Ivanchuk hides his face from the people around him in this moment of vulnerability. Here, too, are the bare outlines of people. Welch’s brush skips over the faces, and possibly judging expressions of the figures surrounding Ivanchuk, making disappearance a mercy.

Coming to the smallest daily chore can be humanised (2025), we find that the artist has done away with people entirely, leaving only a softly-coloured interior. The absence leaves us the space to speculate about what has happened to the room’s absent inhabitants. If the uncertainty of seeing is applied here, then perhaps our initial impression that there are no inhabitants is incorrect. Their presence may be invisible only to us, but not to them: spectres on the sofa who, unlike their counterparts in Welch’s other paintings, have finally given up on embodiment.

Out of all the works in Oedipus, all is vanity feels the most unlike the rest of the exhibition. Its palette is louder with a striking cyan blue taking up most of its plane. It is the total inverse of its black-and-white reference, a double image of a human skull and a woman at her vanity table, illustrated by twentieth-century animator Charles Allan Gilbert. As is typical of memento mori images, Gilbert’s drawing cautions against self-obsession, depicting the wages of death awaiting those who don’t heed. But Welch’s recreation pumps vitality back in through colour. The blue skull is made unserious, cleaned out of any sobering message. The sight of death and the clarity of its lines, the borders between it, the woman and the fuchsia atmosphere persist for now, but for how much longer?

The eye and the brain are the principal instruments of perception in visual culture. Welch bypasses both to scramble any handle one might think they’ve gotten on his work, to tell us, don’t be so sure. The idea of sight isn’t complicated by Welch’s paintings. Instead, he points out its tremulous nature. Up close, the images we perceive of the tourists, of the defeated grandmaster, of Atreides and the rest of Welch’s cast become little more than visual chaff to be swept away at a moment’s notice. What Oedipus leaves us with is pure vestige, the after-image behind shut eyes, dissipating into nothingness.

Diana Bamimeke was the MLP x The Complex writer in residence from March – July 2025.
Oedipus by Lee Welch was exhibited from 24 May - 14 June at The Complex. More information can be found here.
Photos by Lee Welch. Courtesy of the artist and The Complex, Dublin