June 14 Amsterdam, NL. Holland Festival. Lee will premiere a new half-hour work, “Hurricane Transcriptions,” for the Berlin string ensemble Kaleidoskop under the direction of Andre de Ridder. He will be playing and sings with the ensemble. INFO.

June 15 Hasselt, Belgium - Kunstencentrumbelgie
June 16 Zurich, Switzerland - TAKTLOS Festival at Rote Fabrik
June 18 Faenza, Italy - Strade Blu Festival at  Teatro Masini
June 19 Roma, Italy – Pigneto Spazio Aperto
June 20 Milano (Sesto San Giovanni), Italy – Carroponte
June 22 Valeggio sul Mincio, Italy - Castello Scaligero

Sun-Jul-14 Santiago, Chile Ex Oz
Mon-Jul-15 Montevideo, UY La Trastienda
Tue-Jul-16 Buenos Aires, AR Teatro Vorterix

Thu-Jul-18 Araraquara, Sao Paulo, Brasil SESC Araraquara
Fri-Jul-19 Pompeia, Sao Paulo, Brasil SESC Pompeia (Choperia Room)
Sat-Jul-20 Pompeia, Sao Paulo, Brasil SESC Pompeia (Choperia Room)

Tue-Jul-23 Pompeia, Sao Paulo, Brasil SESC Pompeia (Teatro Room) *Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer “Sight Unseen” Performance
Wed-Jul-24 Pompeia, Sao Paulo, Brasil SESC Pompeia (Teatro Room) *Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer “Sight Unseen” Performance

Sun-Jul-28 Guelph, ONT Hillside Festival
Tue-July-30 Hoboken, NJ – Maxwell’s

Hammer Blows video here.

Lee on John Cage (January 2013): TEXT & AUDIO

Albatross: Lee Ranaldo Band feat. J Mascis appear on  ’Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute To Fleetwood Mac’ performing ‘Albatross’, originally  a Peter Green led instrumental by Fleetwood Mac/1969 that inspired The Beatles’ Sun King. Hear the record at Soundcloud or via your favorite digital supplier or record store.

Lee Ranaldo Band plays 4 songs on RollingStone.com plus interview.

LEE’S WALKING MEN 99 TUMBLR BLOG–please send a pic
SOME ‘GRAMS FR THE ROAD-Instagram images from LRB touring this year…
NEW YORKER BLOG 4/25/12: TWO ACOUSTIC SONGS AND INTERVIEW.
Pitchfork’s +1: Lee discusses his new LP and performs songs from it at Glasslands

MATADOR STORE -Order ‘Between The Times & The Tides’ 

LIVE ACOUSTIC ‘BIG BAND’ INSTORE, Melbourne (October 22, 2012).  Lee, Steve, Alan w Tim Luntzel on bass, plus Tim Barnes, perc and JP Shilo, violin:
SHOUTS:      http://vimeo.com/51922165
STRANDED:  http://vimeo.com/51921478

Lee Ranaldo Band live at The HiFi, Melbourne (October 24, 2012):
OFF THE WALL   https://vimeo.com/52093156
ANGLES   https://vimeo.com/52093157
TOMORROW NEVER COMES   https://vimeo.com/52093159
XTINA AS I KNEW HER   https://vimeo.com/52093969

ART SHOWS:
Lee will exhibit his “Lost Highway’ drawings – sketches done from the front seat of the tour van during last summer’s LRB tours in Europe and USA – at Galeria Pedro Oliveira in Porto, Portugal, 27 April-8 June, 2013, alongside the work of Sonic friend Joao Paulo Feliciano, who will be showing collages of amplifiers.

RECENT RELEASES:
Limited Edition Records (1000 copies ea):
Between the Times and the Tides TOUR LP (demos) and SEVEN-INCH (ALTERNATE MIXES of album trax) are now for sale at shows–and available in the SY store. Info HERE.

Lee’s new poetry chapbook, “How Not To Get Played On The Radio”, now out on SoundBarn Press. more info HERE. Available at SY Online Store HERE.

July 2012: Glacial “On Jones Beach” Full length album of Lee’s trio with Tony Buck and David Watson. LP only, comes w d/l card w extra material. Three Lobed Records. INFO HERE.

Lee has a track on the Three Lobed Records all-guitarists recordstore day release “Eight Trails, One Path.”

Lee is also featured on a new Poetry CD by poet-musician David Amram.

Official Facebook
Twitter feed: @leeranaldo
Instagram: leeranaldo

GALERIA PEDRO OLIVEIRA
Calçada de Monchique, 3 . 4050-393 Porto. Portugal
Tel. (+351) 22 200 7131 . Tm. (+351) 918 494 794
www.galeriapedrooliveira.com

LEE RANALDO 2012 LOST HIGHWAY DRAWINGS
NOTES
On of the many things that preoccupies me with drawing is capturing landscape.
As one who travels a great deal, I value the quick sketch made of an interesting
vista. The Lost Highway series of drawings continue to develop an interest of
mine which began in the late 70s, namely how to capture the landscape as it rolls
by the window of a moving car – that elemental vehicle of the Twentieth Century.
In 1976, while still an art student, I did some rolling landscape sketches out the
front window of a van as a friend and I rolled down the East Coast from New York
to Key West, Florida. At the time I was learning about the process of intaglio
etching. The following year I turned one of the studies into a 3-plate color etching, Route 95—Georgia.
Little did I know Iʼd still be doing similar work, drawing rolling highways, more
than 30 years later.

We as a culture spend so much of our time in cars, and as a traveller and touring
musician, I have spent additional long periods of time traveling by car, van, truck
or bus, crisscrossing the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia and elsewhere. It
seems a fact of modern life that we observe landscapes with great frequency
through the windshield of a motor vehicle. The question set forth is: how does
one draw a moving landscape? My first responses were gestural, skeins of lines
following the horizon, the curve of the road and the shapes of the trees,
continuously overlaid upon itself, forming a kinetic image. Over time certain
iconographic images developed, certain curves in the road, views through breaks
in the trees that were seen over and over again, no matter where one was
traveling. The road, like the river, is ever changing and ever the same.

These drawings were done in the summer of 2012 as my band set out across
Europe, and later America, to perform the songs from my 2012 album, Between
the Times and the Tides. The first series was done from the passenger seat of
Mercedes Sprinter Van as we traveled on the Autobahn across Germany, and
later into Denmark. The second series was created while driving across the
Eastern half of the United States, from Connecticut to Virginia, New York City to
Ohio. The third series was created in Nova Scotia, Canada, on the route from
Halifax to Cape Breton.

Lee Ranaldo
New York City
April 2013

Route 95-Georgia (1977), 3 color, 3 plate etching

Interview January 3, 2013 by Elliot Sharp:

photo by John Vittese

Lee Ranaldo is best known as the guitarist and co-founder of Sonic Youth, inarguably one of the most essential American rock bands. But his work outside of that band is just as adventurous, ranging from the singer-songwriter oriented album he released last year on Matador, Between the Times and the Tides, and his more feverish experimental work with critical voices like Mats Gustafsson, Zeena Parkins and William Hooker, and in groups like Text of Light (with Christian Marclay, Alan Licht and Ulrich Krieger ). In addition to his numerous music projects and releases, Ranaldo is also a visual artist and writer.

Ranaldo is performing several times in Philadelphia over the weekend as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Dancing around the Bride,” the massive ongoing exhibit celebrating the work of John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. For these performances, Ranaldo will be interpreting several Cage scores, as well as performing some of his own work.

I caught up with Ranaldo a few days ago on the phone from his home in New York City to talk about his personal relationship with Cage’s work and legacy.

The Key: Did you ever meet John Cage?

Lee Ranaldo: I saw him at a few events around New York in the 1980s, but we weren’t really that friendly.

TK: Do you recall your first encounter with his work?

LR: I think it was “Rainforest IV,” with David Tudor. It was definitely mid-70s, when I was just arriving at college and starting to hear a lot of different avant-garde and 20th century composers, from Edgar Varèse to Karlheinz Stockhausen to John Cage.

TK: What was your first impression?

LR: I would liken it to the one I first had when I encountered mid-century avant-garde American film: at first you don’t know what to make of it, and then you realize it’s an entirely new language that you’re trying to understand. In a sense, you have to work your way into a language, or into a new art form; it’s like coming to an understanding of abstract painting. If you’re coming from the history of popular and classical music, you’re confronted with a group of people working with a completely new set of concerns and tools. It takes a while to find your way in from the outside, and to understand the motivations and reasons why this music is being made, and how they got to this point.

TK: Cage had a few things to say about a 1982 performance by Glenn Branca’s large ensemble, of which you were a part.

LR: It was very controversial at the time. It was a New Music America performance that year in Chicago. The conversation went through many permutations over the years—there was a lot of back-and-forth between Glenn and John—but basically Cage was opposed to the idea of music that stems from a single, solitary leader controlling a group of musicians. He called it “fascist.” It’s completey antithetical to what he was doing, though Cage was still prescribing the roots and routines the musicians would undetake, but he was leaving so much decision-making to the musicians. Glenn’s music stemmed more from serious classical music, where it was one person’s vision and the orchestra was the tool for realizing it. It all came down to the composer, and in this case, the composer-conductor. It sparked a very interesting debate.

TK: What was your opinion at the time?

LR: I thought it was a matter of a misunderstanding, for the most part. It was a matter of Cage having honed a certain muscial row, and wanting to see things move more in that direction. From John’s point of view, Glenn’s music was antiquated, modern and very alive with electric guitars. He thought it was a throwback to 17th or 18th century music, relying too much on a dictatorial composer. I understood his point of view, but I also knew that what Glenn was doing was something amazing. It didn’t matter to me that someone else was unhappy with it, even if that person was John Cage.

TK: In your career, you’ve managed to navigate both of these worlds: performing more composed, popular pieces with Sonic Youth and on your most recent solo album, and doing improvised engagements with other projects grounded more on the agency of the performer.

LR: Definitely. I’ve tried to keep a foot in both worlds. For a modern musician, it’s something you have to understand—you have to know both sides of the coin. If you want to be a composer, or a singer-songwriter, or anything like that, you’re working in a very traditional form that revolves around set pieces of music that are going to be played over and over again in a specific way. You have to accept that as soon as you enter that world. If you grow up in the modern world, and you have an interest in abstraction—whether coming from 20th century classical music, or free jazz, or 60s psychedelia, or free noise—you also have an understanding of where that music’s coming from. In my career, I’ve been lucky enough to exist in a period of time where I didn’t have to eliminate one side of the coin in favor of the other.

TK: Do you have a favorite Cage piece?

LR: I’m not sure. That’s a complicated question when it comes to Cage. Sonic Youth played some Cage pieces back when we were doing the Goodbye 20th Century record, so I have a fondness for those pieces. And then there are others, like “Water Walk,” which was a very comical piece that he performed on a television show. It’s a favorite just because he’s kinda poking fun at the idea of modern music. It’s a very serious piece on his part, but he knew that it would get a particular type of reaction, and it highlights his showmanship. And then there are the “Rainforest” pieces, which are the ones that I first came to. I love those because they encompass so much, and are open to so many different aspects of Cage’s work.

TK: I suppose liking a Cage piece has more to do with the ideas expressed, or what it allows the performer to do, rather than how it sounds.

LR: Yes, liking a piece would have to do with a composer’s intention, and the idea behind the piece. That’s a big part of his compositional style: we’re not working with melodies here, we’re working with ideas. So it’s interesting to watch his ideas progress over the course of his career. I actually really love the early pieces for metal, the percussion pieces from the early collection of his Town Hall concert. He was using brake drums and other found metal objects, and ended up creating something that sounded like Balinese gamelan.

TK: What’s your plan for these upcoming performances in Philadelphia?

LR: I think I’ll be mostly utilizing Cage’s work. The thing about his work is that every musician brings to it his own vocabulary. I’ll be using my style, but playing with his structural ideas. I’m still working through a possible list I’m going to work with. I’m going to do some vocal pieces, and a lot of muscial pieces.

TK: How do you prepare for something like this?

LR: It’s really all about finding the scores, and looking over them in order to get an idea of what’s expected of the musician. It’s not really preparing in the sense of how I’m gonna tune the guitar, or what I’m going to do with my fingers. It’s more about being knowledgeable of the scores.

TK: What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from Cage’s work?

LR: He made this statement once, or I read it somewhere, but someone was asking him about records, and asking him if he listened to his own compositions or what records he liked to listen to in general. What he said struck me as very interesting, and over the years it has become second nature; it’s something I ponder a lot. He said he never felt the urge to listen to a record more than once. He’d give it his attention, and listen to it, and he’d never really need that same experience again. It’s a telling quote, and it’s the very reason why he acted the way he did toward Glenn’s music, and why he wasn’t involved in anything you could label pop.

Pop gets stuck in your head, and it’s something you want to listen to 50 times in a row. His music was all about variation and change–he was randomizing as many components as he could. It wasn’t in his interest to listen to something many times because he wanted everything to sound radically different every time. Musicians love his scores so much because you can interpret them any way that you want. You can ignore them, you can adhere to them, it’s all good.

And the second part of what he said was that he’d rather just open his window and let the sounds come in than listen to recorded music. This is really Cage’s music in a nutshell, and obviously points to his famous piece “4’33″.” It’s the basis of all his music. He was trying to approach the random qualities of the natural world–or the world we live in, whether natural or not–through music. He wanted it to be of that same spirit, if not the same thing. The composer’s hand is at its most minimal. What is the composer doing when the composer is hardly doing anything? It’s like a Zen poem.

Lee Ranaldo plays the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Friday, January 4 (4:30 – 7 p.m.), Saturday, January 5 (1 – 3 p.m.), and Sunday, January 6 (1 – 4 p.m.).

photo by Peter Crimmins

photo by Philadelphia Museum of Art

In contrast, here’s an electric version with the Band from earlier this year, May 17, 2012 at the Buckhead Theatre in Atlanta, GA. Video by vacantmoon.

L

Further: this documentary on the film is really good, generally, although doesn’t go far enough in examining the group’s ties to the England of the 50s that they grew up on, or the avant garde dimension of the film making, which mirrored the poetics and experimentation of the American Avant-Garde Cinema, from Brakhage to Warhol, that was percolating all thru the underground at the time.

With some really great outtake footage, this is the 1 hr doc that should have come w the DVD pkg:
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR REVISITED

CREDITS:
Subject: Michael Raymond Clarke
Directed and Photographed by: Kelly Jeffrey
Produced by: Joseph Clement
Editor: Calum Moore
Production Designer: Erika Lobko
1st AC + Additional Camera Operator: Kiel Milligan
Gaffer: Jackson Parrell
Special Thanks to Breeze

More info HERE and below.

NO PERMANENT LANDSCAPE
Yves Beaumont, Kristina Delmeire, Lee Ranaldo, Leah Singer, Peter Van Impe
Curator: Jan Van Woensel

A collection of related thoughts: Iceland; Scandinavia; travel; on the road; from here to infinity; disappearance; journals; spoken words; weightlessness; gravity; light; burning totems; floating objects; loops and knots; layers; waves; soundscapes; transparency; shifting meanings; reflections … endless sleep.

The artists in“No Permanent Landscape”, an artist from Ostend, Belgian’s seaside, a duo from Antwerp, Belgium, and a duo from New York, United States, share a deep-rooted interest in travel.It was in 1997 when artists Peter Van Impe and Kristina Delmeire told me how “in the summer [they] travel to Iceland, rent a big jeep and drive into the volcanic hills and to the inland’s, stretched out, barren plains to disappear in the clouds”. It was a few years later when I first saw Lee Ranaldo’s self-made, handheld camera, music video for his introvert and dreamy song “Hoarfrost”. The film features Leah Singer visiting her family in the cold, snow-covered, suburban Winnipeg, Canada. The movie is a road trip, filmed mainly from the passenger’s seat and sometimes taking subtly edited detours to blurred images of personal imagination and memories. The journey is both physical and introspective. More recently, I saw Yves Beaumont’s one man show at galerie Jan Dhaese. Walking through his exhibition it felt as if I was walking in the night, only now and then recognizing a contour of something against a backdrop of a weak light in the far distance: both mysterious and breathtaking.

The artists in “No Permanent Landscape” work in different media: printmaking, drawing, painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture and installation. For this occasion, a modest selection of etches, lithography’s, silkscreens and sculpture form the fragmented, visual landscape of the art show. The contradiction between the quality of permanency of the art image, as well as the artwork’s reproducibility, and the fluid and transitory conceptual undertone of the exhibition’s theme is deliberate. The artworks appear both as scaled simulations of vast and deserted landscapes and mindscapes, and as windows that look out to such imagined sceneries. Yves Beaumont’s secret landscapes linger between dusk and dawn as in a permanent state of night; the most quiet time of life. The mysterious, misty, almost ghost-like images of Kristina Delmeire remind us of both the beauty and the uncanniness of nature. Lee Ranaldo’s works, made on the road, recall the endlessness of the journey, during which feelings like boredom, homesickness and melancholy could occupy his mind. Peter Van Impe’s boat-like models remind us of the departure, great solitude and disappearance: the sensation of setting out to sea, floating alone, on an immense mass of water, like artist Bas Jan Ader once fatally did. Leah Singer’s transparent, multi-layered images of mountains and grasslands, strings and loops, portraits and stars enable a complexity of perspectives to the viewer; there is no one possible view; there is no exclusive route; there is no permanent landscape.

Jan Van Woensel, Fire Island, NY (2010)

NO PERMANENT LANDSCAPE
Boothuis Brauhaus
September 28th, 2012 -
Nieuwe Kaai 29, 2300 Turnhout, Belgium
Part of “Turnhout Cultural Capital of Flanders 2012″

PITCHFORK review

DUSTED review

TRANS-ATLANTIC review

Consequence of Sound review

Three Lobed Records page

LP released july 24, 2012 in a limited edition of approximately 750 copies. $19.00.

three lobed recordings was first exposed to studio sounds from the long-running but profoundly under-recorded glacial in 2008. that introduction came in the form of the first track on lee ranaldo’s contribution to the oscillation III series, maelstrom from drift. the sounds generated by ranaldo, david watson and tony buck were enveloping and other-worldly – immediately we knew we needed to hear more. once asked if more studio evidence of this project existed, lee was quick to answer “oh, yes.” now, in 2012 three lobed recordings is exceptionally excited to present on jones beach, the trio’s debut full-length release. much like that track from 2008, this album is a majestic and ambitious journey unlike anything else going on in either the underground or the mainstream. here are some thoughts on this album from james “wooden wand” toth:

“on jones beach reflects three men at the top of their craft. recorded in 2005 at sonic youth’s echo canyon studios, the album proper is made up of a single titular piece that runs almost 48 minutes. what’s stunning is how the trio appears, in that time, to charter a tour of the last 40+ years of guitar-based psychedelic improv. you’ve got your supremely stoned ambient drone, your slack-stringed doom metal guitar minimalism, your groovy post-branca skronk, your devotional new thing-indebted bleats and tantrums. more impressive than the amount of ground covered during this running time is the fact that these players can make these elements blend so seamlessly and so completely artfully.

at the risk of relying on tired and obvious clichés, glacial is a great name for this group – it doesn’t take a whole lotta reefer or imagination to envisage this album as the soundtrack to the melting of polar ice caps, or some ominous continental disruption. watson concurs. “the name ‘glacial’ came from someone in the audience after our first gig, describing what the music felt like,” he says. “powerful but slow moving masses of energy.” this is no hyperbole – the idiomatic lyricism displayed over the duration of on jones beach eerily evokes drifting, majestic monoliths like few other albums to make such potentially damnable and high-minded claims.

and this is all before you consider the bagpipes. even among the many truly drone-based instruments at the disposal of an adventurous musician in 2012, there is surprisingly little evidence of the use of bagpipes in an avant context. albert ayler’s less celebrated later work comes to mind, as do the experiments of seminal ethno-noise punks amps for christ, but overall, it is a neglected tool in the improvising musician’s toolbox. here, watson’s exemplary command of the instrument makes a solid case for not only its inclusion in the future of improvised music but its ubiquity, as it rises about halfway through the piece to an assertive, unexpected prominence amidst the impressionistic din. elsewhere it holds court alongside Ranaldo’s yearning guitar drones, which frequently resemble a horde of audible sun rays (i mean that in a good way), while drummer buck approaches the kit with sunny murray-like symphonic colorations. buck, best known for his brilliant work with australia’s the necks, is always a contemplative, thoughtful percussionist, and he’s especially powerful here. late in the piece, when only he remains for a solo section of ritualistic rattle before being joined again by ranaldo, this time on a smattering of bells and pieces of metal, the effect is transportive.

“on friuli island 1” and “on friuli island 2” are both culled from recordings made at the mimi Festival in France in 2003 – the first gig with Buck on drums. “on norfolk Street” was recorded in April 2006, at the much-missed tonic club in new york city. the pair of friuili island tracks finds the trio more contemplative than on the album proper, without that track’s overdubs and temporal girth, but not missing any of its compelling, dissonant charm. the first excerpt slowly builds from small sounds to a maelstrom of stoned guitar and frenetic bagpipe abuse, while part two is a showcase for buck, as he pounds his toms menacingly over a thick slab of amplifier worship from watson and ranaldo. at a relatively stingy seven minutes, “on norfolk street” is like a teaser for the album as well as a nice peek into the live sounds conjured by the band.

the entirety of on jones beach moves like a classic ESP side, with long spaces for solo sections giving way to bone-rattling, protean group improv, and then back again. and like those best ESP sides, the featured players achieve incantation by their ability to listen and respond via contemplation in motion, without ever sacrificing cohesion for cacophony, as is the tendency among less intuitive improvisers. there is profound virtuosity here on the part of all three conjurers, who spellbind and astonish in the tradition of the heaviest spirits. you really should be writing all this down.”

on jones beach is from an edition of approximately 750 copies and is pressed on 140 gram dutch vinyl by record industry. the album is housed within a handsome multi-color silkscreened jacket bearing new photographic artwork from ursula scherrer. The vinyl edition of the album presents the studio session in two twenty-one minute installments. the album is be accompanied by a download coupon for DRM-free MP3s of the complete 48 minute studio session as well as three live bonus tracks. on jones beach was tenderly mastered by patrick klem. the LP costs $19.00 postpaid in the US, $22.50 to canada and $30.00 postpaid to all non-US, non-canadian locations. the album’s street date is july 24 but all pre-orders will ship as soon as the LPs are on hand (likely early july).

Curated by Jan Van Woensel

June 24th till July 29th 2012
Opening Sunday June 24th 2012, 4pm – 7pm

More info (pics & text) on www.jandhaese.be

Widely known as one of the original, founding members of New York City’s groundbreaking, experimental rock band Sonic Youth, and currently touring to scattered parts of the world with his new band, Lee Ranaldo is a musician, artist, writer, performer, publisher and a restless, observant traveler. “Constellations”, a selection of paintings on paper produced in the past couple of years, is his first, major solo exhibition in a Belgian contemporary art gallery, and offers us a glimpse of Ranaldo’s inexhaustibly growing oeuvre.

Closing event: Saturday, July 28th at Boothaus Brauhaus with live music by Jan Van Woensel’s noise-rock band Pilots & Waves and video projections of Lee Ranaldo.

Galerie Jan Dhaese
Ajuinlei 15B
9000 Gent
Belgium

M : +32 (0)477 43 77 94
www.jandhaese.be

A Belgian Radio program of Lee-related audio HERE.

CONSTELLATIONS
Lee Ranaldo
Curator: Jan Van Woensel

“The world is moving so fast and all our lives are so fast because of the internet and modern culture in general. Nobody has time to linger on any one thing. That’s the value of doing something like handmade time consuming artworks. It seems significant somehow, trying to slow things down. This is something everybody is grappling with these days, the lack of time to focus on anything in a deep way. That’s why I go bike riding and play tennis. Those are activities that I do lately that I find greatly rewarding.” (Lee Ranaldo interviewed by Niels Van Tomme and Jan Van Woensel for Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, April 2007, NYC, USA)

Widely known as one of the original, founding members of New York City’s groundbreaking, experimental rock band Sonic Youth, and currently touring to scattered parts of the world with his new band, Lee Ranaldo is a musician, artist, writer, performer, publisher and a restless, observant traveler. “Constellations”, a selection of paintings on paper produced in the past couple of years, is his first, major solo exhibition in a Belgian contemporary art gallery, and offers us a glimpse of Ranaldo’s inexhaustibly growing oeuvre.

Painted pictures of private airplanes, ballet dancers and foreign landscape sceneries, a blindfolded performer, palm trees, an armed soldier, handwritten poems, a pair of hands, street signs, the Beatles and a portrait of composer Glen Gould, each based on newspaper photos — this collection of (at first sight) randomly selected images show how Ranaldo observes the world around him. The absence of any clear hierarchy or favoritism in his paintings’ subject matter proves an equal interest in a seemingly endless multitude of objects, places and people. Ranaldo is a worldwide drifter, a fascinated, destined wanderer into the unpredictability of infinite space and time. On his path he collects images from the never-static world and persistent media flow, and turns them into personalized, sober black and white paintings. Irrevocably divorced from their original context, Ranaldo’s media-inspired images evidently turn into ghosts or shadows: their image is still readable to the viewer but their message has gone astray. Being faithful to the initial context in which these images first appeared is not, however, significant to Ranaldo’s work process. He explains: “… newspaper photos are the most ephemeral; they’re on our table today and in the trash tomorrow. I’m trying to ‘liberate’ certain images that appeal to me from their original contexts and give them a new and different life…” (Lee Ranaldo interviewed by Scott Indrisek for Art Info, Sep 2010, NYC, USA)

In “Constellations” the artist creates unique meanings by confronting diverse, random images in clusters on the gallery walls. The combinatory possibilities are endless and inexhaustible, and none of the created constellations are absolute or permanent. By creating these temporary groupings, Ranaldo seems to simulate the transient experience that the public has with his live music performances on guitar, feedback and distortion effect pedals and a variety of percussion instruments: dissonant, monotone sounds appear; they grow louder and more intense and are able to move the audience to distant places, even if only for a couple of seconds, before they crumble down, fade out and eventually disappear. Such momentary, yet impactful grasps of attention are custom to Lee Ranaldo’s artistic work method and life in general. Ranaldo is on the road, he is a passenger. Everything passes by and through him, before him, beside and behind him as he moves forward or in any other direction. He collects, recreates and re-presents. In his practice, Ranaldo determinedly confronts the restless, fast paced character of his life as a traveling musician and artist with the time, concentration and consuming character of making paintings, with ink and acrylic paint on paper, by hand in his studio.

“Constellations” is one of the few, large-scale exhibitions in which only the artist’s painted artworks take up the gallery space. The rather unobvious absence of his video, installation, live performance and collaborative artworks (with experimental filmmaker, artist, designer, and partner Leah Singer) is sort of unique. “Constellations” is probably one of Ranaldo’s most quiet exhibitions, in which old and new painted memories from home and far away meet. The exhibition is a temporary gathering and momentary confrontation of thoughts, destined to disperse in indefinite directions: from here to infinity.

Jan Van Woensel, Brussels 2012

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