The universe is one net. The more holes there are, the tighter the net and the more complex the knit becomes. To know the universe, you have to deal with the strings and the holes. This is the trouble with the universe: that the strings imply holes, and the holes imply strings. Form and formlessness wage at war and love. It is a great labor to deal with both strings and holes, oblivion and infinitude at once. Turned inside out and outside in, you labor at the risk of being exploded or collapsed.

Jet Le Parti brings us the weave of it all. In no uncertain terms, the artist proffers a map: of his thoughts, his learning, of space and time, of mechanisms and magics, of equations and symbols, of science and of himself.

 Today’s works are the ‘Melting Blues’. The collection is a testament to vastness and voids, the convergence and collapse of spacetime, and Le Parti’s authenticity amid the profusions of reality. You walk through the three floors of paintings, some of monumental scale, and are suffused in the artist’s sense of mourning and divinity. The solemnity and ubiquity of the blues provide discipline which works to balance the artist’s evident sense of excitement, even mania. You imagine him on the floor, on a ladder, and wonder what intensity he must have sustained to create the frenetic expanse now finished before you. In each work, it is as if Le Parti finds a loose thread along the seam of the universe and gives it a tug.

 The collection is indeed “melting” in the progressive tense. The works exist at a precisely chosen melting point as if thawing and releasing idea previously kept behind ice, like the microbes escaping from Antarctic glaciers. In Le Parti’s ambient mood and temperature, colors, shapes and universes flow with deep, slow currents and drip into each other. The collection is held at a point just a few degrees above freezing by the force of the painter’s personality such that you encounter all the color field washes, the Twombly scribbles, the Rauschenberg pasting and collaging, the cave drawing figurations, the de Kooning strokes in a liminal melt, as if the artist has shredded up his art textbooks in a blender and imbibed in this for nourishment.

 It is as if you can see the painting move from gaseous sound to liquid thought to solid vision, the laws of physics temporarily suspended for this particular man. We are only so lucky as to see it in this state of uncertain matter than refuses to stay painted just one way. As in Rothko’s definition of excellent art, the shared elements of uncommonly strong work are all present: death, shape, irony, depth.

 But Le Parti is not interested in holding still. If these works are ‘melting’ at some sublime temperature, then they have as much to do with motion as they do with temperature. The paintings vibrate, quiver, shiver, as if they are always just about to break out into the same flurry of motion which must have created them. It is as if each has its own frequency and thus its own temperature, its own sound, its own aliveness. In their presence, you hold audience with this aliveness whether you like it or not.

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The collection began with a sound, Le Parti explains. Clear. Precise. Perhaps even piercing, with a kind of violence in its noise.

 We mustn’t ask where the sound came from. We can only surmise that Jet Le Parti is its radio tower, receiving some frequency which we might all experience in small vibrations passing through us without ever registering the note. This sound has plucked some chord within Le Parti, a string he is lucky (or unlucky) enough to have in his person. Today, Le Parti brings the sound into our world in a collection of (#) oils and watercolors.

 To bring the noise into our realm, Le Parti makes new spaces: voids, chasms, crevices, seams of reality. Such spaces were translated into the visual realm by using the sound Le Parti heard pre-fabrication as if he has used echolocation; Le Parti emits his special wavelengths of genius and returns with the echoes bounced off the unseen, quivering matrix of reality. These echoes are enough to reconstruct maps of hidden truths, like sonar on the unlit ocean floor. 

 You get the sense that Jet is working on some divine homework assignment, a problem set straight from the mystic physicist’s classroom. There are no right answers, only a deep sense that the purpose of existence is to appreciate the scale of these mysteries and to venerate those who have or who may find a solution to the riddles troubling Le Parti.

 Best of all, Le Parti refuses to obfuscate. His thoughts and process of meaning making are all there on the canvas. He uses whatever language he can find or needs to share his insights: trigonometry, journal entries, black hole swirls, physics equations, edited pages from Baudrillard, polaroids, timelines of human history. By any means necessary, Le Parti transmits without a need for cloaking or shyness. His ego is here and so are his mistakes. His insides and outsides bared for your exploratory surgery of the works. You have to imagine Le Parti had no anesthesia in getting here.

 ‘Melting Blues’ are what the artist calls “the onset of the relativistic”. It is a special relativity, if you will, however, because these pieces fearless endeavors. No topic is too mystical or bold, too intellectual or scientific. The terms of what information is too complex or too obscure to be “understood” by the layman are rejected. That quantum physics or philosophy or math or black holes or time are too difficult to be comprehended or digested and best left to the experts, is a construction we hide behind and here has been deconstructed. In (work x), Le Parti goes through the painstaking mathematical steps of arriving “a square has 4 sides” and you imagine he brought the canvas to class, taking notes in his chicken scratch right on the linen. Or, you imagine him in his studio with a journal recording in humble graphite a passage read aloud by Deleuze which plays from a YouTube video. In this collection, Le Parti refuses to hide behind himself or anyone else. He dares to do the exploration that makes a usual person spooked by failure, an insufficient IQ or the number of years since they last took math. In this sense, you must award him the word “intrepid”. And you must thank him for his impulse to be that radio tower, decoding its signal for anyone to see and asking for nothing but your attention in return. ::

:: Josephine DeWitt. : Artists of the Times: ch. 11 Jet Le Parti