Joe Andoe — Almine Rech Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 23 → April 8, 2023

Almine Rech is pleased to present Joe Andoe’s fifth solo show with the gallery, on view from February 23 to April 8, 2023.

A Joe Andoe painting sounds like a low vibrational hum, like static between radio stations, the soft drone of electromagnetic waves traveling through ink black space before snapping into focus. Andoe’s pictures are him tuning into a station, which can be a moment in time, or a feeling. They can look like real places or recognizable things, Andoe’s pictures, spectral stags and chickens, ghostly in their stark white whiteness; a pond in cinematic panorama (what Joe calls his Hillbilly Elysian Field, or an afterlife fishing hole), but they’re really portals, the way all sounds are. Tune the dial and the frequency changes.

Andoe often locates his frequency in the shapes of his Tulsa youth. For a while he didn’t like to talk about where his imagery came from, not from embarrassment or secrecy or posturing but because he didn’t think it was important. Like the lights and cables around a movie set: “you pan away from the set, it kills the magic.” But people like knowing these things. His subjects aren’t riddles. He thinks of them as colors that he dips into.

 — Max Lakin, critic and writer