Joey Haley — Paintings and drawings — Olivier Robert Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 21 → November 20, 2010

What is so fascinating in Joey Haley’s work is that he is the only one capable of bringing together Dave Davies, outstanding guitarist of the Kinks and Albert Einstein, outstanding physicist of relativity. All three agree on the notion of distortion. Fontana’s mauling of the former’s amp at the source of saturation in rock joins the spatiotemporal digressions of the latter in the same pictorial momentum. Haley is like raw noise in a tense cosmos, putting order in chaos, and conversely.

This ambivalence is at the heart of Joey Haley’s work. He builds paintings and drawings with the same concern for strictness and freedom, navigating between abstraction and representation, trying constantly to twist elements. In a constant search for fluidity and movement, he practices a gestural and spontaneous approach that he then forces into a claimed formalism. From then on, we find preparatory drawings with marked linear structures, backgrounds with finely-worked landscapes, and concealed mythological or historic themes. However, everything is folded over the appearance of an elsewhere, an optical distortion. He returns with the same elegance to a real exploration of shape and color. From fluorescent to pastel, the chromatic palette is as wide as the gallery of his fantasies.

His themes live in an unpublished classicism. If sexuality occupies an important place, it’s always deviant, giving a fair share to inflatable dolls, golden showers and other fellatios. It acts as the reflection of our twisted, and sick societies. It is expressed through a pictorial blur, a shiver of the image. Other characters seem taken in a silent and mysterious dialogue where the symbolism of their gestures contain a luminous darkness. Circle, water and fire, the trinity, and a certain melancholy are so many marks that draw a psychic geography. The ensemble forms an " incoherent coherence " according to the artist’s own terms. A flow, a hurricane of slowness.

If all these elements revolve, saturate and contort, it is thanks to the incredible energy which is unleashed by Joey Haley’s painting and which maintains this shifting universe. What is certain in any case, is that had Einstein been a punk, he would have painted like Haley.