Still Paintings Erasing Limitations of Reason and Emotion

 

          The artist Kim, Kil Soog’s works are not painting of copying something or of reproducing specific shape. Since non objective abstract painting in modern art history is an act for seeking essential of painting, it is likely to see her works from a view of an experiment in forms on flat painting space based on the flow in modern art history, which is a common practice.

If you directly see her works, however, you will feel something stirring even without any shapes or symbols of a concrete object. Although her works do not reproduce visible shape, they make you feel weird as if you encountered huge existence or you were absorbed into some energy. That can be partly because her works are of a huge scale but more significantly because they imply beyond what canvas shows with overwhelming movements of brushes and screens themselves painted with those strokes of the brushes.

         

          What the artist says is, however, that these movements of brushes are results from erasing or making a stop for something rather than for drawing one. She says she would spend a few months or even years getting emotional and excited or focusing her energy before canvas to create a piece. It takes a while more before she starts making the brush strokes. Once she begins to work on the piece, in the blink, she finds something that she has longed for and intended to see after focusing, stopping and erasing the screen which has already been painted. It is exactly when she stops the work.

From this point of view, the empty space called canvas can be space where nonverbal emotions such as shivers or inspirations are coming back to the artist. In some sense, because the canvas can be seen as empty space where all the memories are erased rather than nothing is on, it can be rather appropriate space where the artist can find the non-shapable world with some existence or feelings which is not subject to verbal expressions. Though it can seem to be space of oblivion at a glance, it can also be open space of hope where the memories can be found by raising and erasing the curtain of oblivion through her work.

As blurred focus can suddenly be sharp, the artist focuses more on meeting the moment of inspiration which has been longed for by the artist by erasing than on making a drawing. That is why the artist could wait before the canvas so long.

The scene of canvas encountered through these processes can be as similar to when one person experiences instinct inspiration which is coming from meeting synchronized or identical existence as a mother gives birth to her child with an overwhelming feeling that she would find herself in the baby, the other existence.

 

         Though a long period of birth pangs is horribly ambiguous, the life after the pain is of overflowing mystery and impression. The artist, therefore, faces canvas with excitement every time she works on pieces. After a long wait, she reaches its peak in her painting and is exhausted on finishing the work because every moment of her creation would be desperately dangerous moments like those of a mother.

In that sense, though the proposition of her works ‘Sound of Memory’ starts from canvas, the space of oblivion, it seems to be text which is caused by repetitive actions of focusing and erasing energies during the process of creation like labor pains or which is discovered in an impact or an echo from the excitement that the artist experiences on the artist’s other self created by her or some existence equal to herself as a result of her work.

In addition, the artist intends to leave her works between stressful traces of painting and erasing not to make her thoughts or feelings reproduced with so much vivid shape. The artist wants to stop when approaching something after wandering unknown space. Therefore, she focuses more on when and where to stop and erase than on making a drawing. It seems that the artist vaguely believes she can come near to something that has been longed for.

The halt for the artist can be a climactic moment when she and other unknown existence meet and a moment of liberation from time and space which is instant and eternal at the same time. As the unknown object that the artist longs for cannot be locked up in or defined as any physical limitations such as time or space, the artist would just leave the uncertain and ambiguous traces faced when escaping from reproducible shape.Thus, the artist only wants to leave her traces from the moment of inspiration on canvas except detailed description or reproduction as a scar is more powerful to express patient’s pain than any other realistic literature or photograph. The more fixed an object is to specific shape or limitations, the farther it gets from the existing reality.

 

          Her works are heading a point beyond a mere art genre of painting. Since it can be vivid traces as a human being and nonverbal record to express her unique way to communicate with the world by a kind of echoes, her paintings are not just one of artistic scenes but also one incident implying artist’s various emotions such as pain, pleasure and excitement to the unknown world which she encounters. 

 

Lee, Seung-hoon, Cyart Research Institute