Lee Wells

PLUS ULTRA

New Paintings and Works from the Collection

First View: Saturday, 20 June 2026, 14:00–20:00
Hydra Interventions: Sunday 20 June - 26 June
Second View: Sunday, 28 June 2026, 14:00–18:00

Private View By Appointment: 29 June – 5 July 2026

Venue: IFAC Athina, Galaxia 11, Neos Kosmos, Athens 11745

+30 694 279 4999

--

A self-organized mess of recent paintings thrown into dialogue with important artworks from his collection.

My practice never sat still inside one clean theory. 

The work in PLUS ULTRA is material argument, political gut-punch, erotic collision, spiritual ache, time-trap, and psychological autopsy all at once. 

Not because I forced them together, but because they were already slamming into each other inside me. 

That unresolved friction is the medium. 

The automatic hand swinging in the dark is the only argument that holds.

PLUS ULTRA. 

Further beyond. 

Not some grand ambition. 

A bare necessity. 

It names the method that was already running the studio long before it had a name: 

the stubborn conviction that the hand knows things the mind cannot see coming. 

You make. 

You discover what you could not have planned. 

The only honest response is to keep going, keep striking, push past whatever you thought you understood.
 

This is a proving ground of accumulated differences. 

Smooth in places, brutally striated in others, always material, always ready to collide. 

The installation does not explain the mess. 

It just opens the door and give you the opportunity to feel.
 

The paintings that fill the space came out of a systematic destruction of their own beginnings. 

A zone of pure psychological bliss where desire runs raw, without story, and memory slams forward onto the surface instead of hiding in fake depth. 

The automatic mark does not invent. It retrieves. 

Faces I thought I had left behind, crowds I never asked for, the sickening moment when you can't tell your own skin from the crowd's. 

All of it erupts through the gesture like involuntary memory punching through the body. 

The past arrives as present shock, not polite history.
 

This is how it actually happened. 

Theory and practice chewing each other raw in the studio for years, no audience, no safety net. 

The Bataille, the Bergson, the Situationist stuff came later. Naming what the hand was already doing in private. 

PLUS ULTRA is simply the first time that private discovery steps into the space where it was born.
 

The work lives in two registers that are really one. 

Inside: the haptic third eye pressed hard against the skull, body dissolving into event and fragment, desire stripped naked, self staring straight into the void. 

This is not warm-up. 

This is the method. 

The perpetually broken architecture that refuses to heal. 

Outside: that same pressure turns carnal, private dissolution becomes public body, one self crashes into many until nobody can tell where the edges are anymore. 

The garden party is already the battle. 

The dream is already the vortex.
 

Watteau's melancholy garden, Rubens's carnal excess, Goya's stripped masks.

 Not references but pressures I work against. 

Those parties always carried their own ending. 

I add what they could not see coming: us, sitting inside the party watching the real-time disaster on screens. 

The bodies in these paintings do not know if they are fucking or fighting. 

Neither do we. 

That confusion is not clever ambiguity. 

It is just accurate.
 

Love's defiant battle in the garden of war.
 

Against the slick, frictionless speed of the digital age, these paintings throw real weight. 

You cannot scroll past them. 

You have to stand there and take it. 

Post Verba, Verbera. 

After all the words, the blow.

The Rubensian vortex, the built-up density of years of reworking, the impasto like actual matter. 

They force the eye to stop. 

This is not nostalgia. 

It is sabotage. 

Deliberate failure injected into the smooth machine. 

The pictorial fact standing there raw, unmediated, refusing to become data.
 

This is what PLUS ULTRA finally is: a reckoning with the practice that was always happening underneath everything else. 

Paintings accumulating in the margins of a life. 

The cycle is not neat. 

It is how consciousness actually moves: inward collapse, outward collision, dispersal, return. 

From the isolated self to the entangled mass and back to the mark that says the body was here and never existed.
 

This is the method.

This is Plus Ultra.