Hold your Hand Out in the Darkby Lee Noble

Littered with masked intruders, retrospectively poetic B-movie titles, and eerily magnified CCTV footage, transitory figures appear in Lee Noble’s paintings like missing person posters on a coin laundromat’s bulletin board. Frequently sourced from obscure 1980s sci-fi and horror film fanzines, these mysterious characters – the off-brand Mark Hamill in Green Window III; a trio of cyborgs posed like an extraterrestrial boy band in Direct to Video – are unmoored from their narrative origins and set adrift in the artist’s carefully composed universe. By turns ominous, amusing, enigmatic, and always intriguing, they act as ambassadors for lost visions of the future that were never able to escape their shameful pasts.

Recalling the woozy afterimage flicker of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and the smiling savagery of early works by Alex da Corte, Noble’s paintings balance sunshine and noir, the nausea of fear with the comfort of camp, and rigid geometry with evocative abstraction. With a palette honed from his time living in LA, the artist’s cinematic hues – aquarium teal, oil refinery orange – fend off an enclosing pitch black as desperately as Michael Mann’s denatured cityscapes.