“To bear a name is both terrible and necessary. The child emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that an escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one’s substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source.
”

— Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star, 1976

No symbols where none intended, Silly renditions of human behaviour, like a string we can only see the middle of, and being swept along is not enough, the acceptance of solitude, a “favourite” of Bergé, some long ascent, A sudden softness, where nothing is allowed to be itself, like light and cloud-shadows, the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment, through the abundance of its pasts, the frighteningly silent abyss, Future Primitive I, & II, the song of a bird that has come to love its cage, Keeping your head up, True level digging comes up, goes down, This is how we walk on the moon, Another isolated incident, what else can I say I’m still waiting for this moment to be gone,. LEE WELCH’s and PAUL HALLAHAN’s painting titles have epic ambitions and cosmic proportions. Sealed with dangling commas, they suggest more is on the literary horizon but, the present painting, painted before its title, is just about enough—for now. This way? or that way? we are caught in a shower of choice littered with compromise. Looking forward into the sky, these painting titles encompass time, space, dream and the tormenting nature of language as it confronts the felt discrepancy between solitude and isolation, up and down, or the “middle of a string”. We are prompted to relate the unrelatable relationship between painting and its title—the painting saying one thing, the title saying quiet another—in this garble of ventriloquism that is doll but not in synch. Everything echoes here in the infinite present. Similar in grammar and sentiment but sealed with a full stop, and the tide was way out., are the last words from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), and the first words we entertain at the entrance to Lee Welch’s and Paul Hallahan’s two-man exhibition at dlr Lexicon Gallery (on second thoughts maybe we should have started with these…). It’s almost perverse to have the last words of a novel as the epigraph for an exhibition. Not that and the tide was way out. is a spoiler. No. DFW’s Infinite Jest is immune to spoilers—you have to read Infinite Jest to not get it. The last words turned first words here have the same effect as a rainbow trout’s tail catching its own splash above the water, and then gone, still, just like that… The end. Against the young-white-male-reader stereotype, my wife just finished Infinite Jest. One night last week before she came to ...and the tide was way out., she found herself adrift after accidentally swiping forward into the book’s infamous endnotes on her Kindle. The morning after she quizzed me about the ending: “Does it end here, when Gately…?” There was a sense that she didn’t want it to end, that the end (that was not the end) was okay, for now, and the swipe forward was a way of prolonging the conversations we’d been having for the past two months. I called Infinite Jest an experience; she said she didn’t want it to end. History is all about ends. (We forget our beginnings.) Lee Welch and Paul Hallahan—neither one a synecdoche of the other, like Deleuze for Guattari—present work that is meant to be felt rather than seen. That’s my first and last thought which, from here on in, is just being coloured in. The present is an important thing to think about when you walk the length of the dlr Lexicon among this room full of paintings that, centurian-like, guard the white walls. We can divide this colourful guard into two artists for sure. Lee is the figurative painter, using paint to mount tanned polyester (and history) with deliberate brushstrokes in a heavy palette of soft viridans and peachy pinks and mallow whites and glinting silvers “and so on” (an expression of maximalist Wallace’s as if et cetera was not nearly enough to sum up the excess of life); Paul is a process painter, meeting the canvas horizontal, letting paint pool and loll and stain where a human or brush cannot sink. As a divider the semicolon is fragile between these two; the semicolon being uncertain of its function anyway. Beckett didn’t like the semicolon. Let’s go deeper. Lee’s painting activity is ‘young’ as a recently turned painter. Without the weight of history in terms of toil and waste that is valued as legacy, as sacrifice in the painter’s commitment to the long game. There is something valuable about being a newly born. Everything’s new to the touch; the hold and curse of language is a long way off. Lee’s paint lies on the surface, rebounding off the threads in fat strokes that are meant to be. Paint feels like it’s being pushed through from the backside of the brown canvas like at-hand Sudocrem in a house with kids. Medicinally clean paint comes smeared on the abject tan of the canvas as if the artist is wearing surgical green gloves before the shit hits the fan: a clean Mike Kelley is always more complicated than a dirty Mike Kelley. References to other painters abound here, from the late starters to the mystical. Alas all are being forgotten in their recruitment--traces in the sand before the sandstorm. These paintings are the pulsing negatives we see floating on the landscape after we turn away from a blinding flash of light. If Lee is a surface painter—the glimpse of the rainbow trout’s tail—then Paul is the fish that disappeared, deep beneath. Paul’s paintings look like submerged survivors of an abandoned artist’s studio where the leaking roof finally gave way to the sky, sun, and moon unabated for several hundred winters and so on. These are night and day paintings as seen from outer space. They don’t have markers of sun or moon because eyes have been long lost to the long and flat cosmos. Time is embedded as paint, deep set in the fibres, put there by gravity and slant. Paul’s digital projection of sequential circular images of the lush and alive natural world is thrown from the inside of the exhaust-pipe-black depths of an almost obsolescent overhead projector. This tautological contraption is something you might make if you were lost and had time to stop getting lost further in time. It’s a giant step back, a pin-prick view from inside some dark closet on the moon that has been riddled by the shrapnel of deep space and time. This is the view of our echo. A beginning, an ending, or just a moment between, Lee and Paul collide at the centre of the gallery in two collaborative paintings, two portraits, that summon other art historical ménage à deux on paper and canvas by Willem & Robert or Andy & Jean-Michel. Why? I’m intrigued. They are paintings that are less adrift, less lost, less isolated or in need of solitude. They momentarily hold each other, a parenthetical break in this yearning sentence that has no full stop