Work
Daffy Duck holds a shield while a hammer comes down behind him. Mickey stands next to a black cat that is showing its teeth. Homer Simpson folds his arms in front of a window full of orange. Lamothe takes the cast of American children's television and drops it into scenes nobody wrote for it, painted flat and bright in the register of a subway piece. The figures are recognisable in half a second, which is the point; what they are doing takes longer.
Ink on paper, and almost no colour. The ground is filled in by hand with thousands of small marks until the paper turns into a dense grey weather, and the figures are cut out of it in white. Joe Louis throws a punch. A father and son lean into each other under a cloud that reads LOVE. The restraint is the interesting part: the same hand that fills whole walls works here at the scale of a fingernail.
Seikaiha, written 青海波, is a Japanese pattern of overlapping arcs standing for waves on a calm sea. It has been printed on textiles since the Heian period. Lamothe showed in Tokyo more than once, at the Yasuko Gallery in 1987 and at Tomorrowland in 1998 and 2002, and the pattern stayed with him: it runs as a woven grey texture through the borders and backgrounds of this group, under a bull, a kabuki face, a street sign for the Lower East Side.
Painting on canvas and paper, including the pieces where the frame is painted rather than bought: a border of red dots on green, a blue field carrying the same rhythm around the edge of the picture, made at the same time as the picture itself. A habit that comes from working on surfaces that never had frames to begin with. The subjects come from wherever Lamothe happened to be looking, which over the years meant Haiti, New York and Paris in roughly equal measure.
The most recent group, painted on canvas. The line has grown thicker and the compositions calmer: a row of skulls on a white ground, two dancers folded into one pink cloud, a skeleton being picked at by two birds under a green sky. One of these, The Skeleton, was shown at Galerie SLP in Berlin for Black History Month.
No works in this series.