Paul Chan
Odysseus and the Bathers

Its title is drawn from an essay by Chan called Odysseus as Artist (2017), which pivots around the term polytropos. The word, which appears in The Odyssey’s very first line, is frequently attached to Odysseus, and holds many meanings: wily, inventive, infinitely cunning. For Chan, polytropos is critical not only to how artists work, but to why art matters today.

Odysseus and the Bathers was an exhibition in motion. At its heart are the ‘Bathers’: moving bodies, fabric figures which lean and twist and flail. These are, Chan says, breathing artworks, which create different varieties and shades of motion. The artist sees these turbulent sculptures as acting like moving images, but rendered in three dimensions.

The exhibition was also punctuated by unstretched canvases, each hanging on a wall mounted rack, like beach towels drying in hotel bathrooms. The works are Matisse-like approximations in blues and pinks and yellows, painted in bright off-the-shelf colours. The figures in these works all derive from the patterns that Chan uses to make the ‘Bathers’. Crucially, none of the forms or colours overlap, touch or integrate (“Just like America”, as Chan notes).