“The evening star is the most beautiful of the stars not because of the proportion of its component parts but because it affords the eyes a joyous and pleasant brilliance.” 

Homilia in Hexaëm, II, 7., Basil of Caesarea

 

Today, painting has expanded its boundaries and acquired new vitality by utilizing unusual materials or overlapping itself with sculpture or installation. Gallery JJ has organized the exhibition of Park Hyunjoo, who has demonstrated a unique painting methodology centered on the light. Her work is ultimately an expansion of the painting’s realm. The artist who has studied tempera while majoring in material techniques in Japan is constantly looking for the new realm of painting related to visual illusions and planarity. The light she creates is not a result of technology but from well-polished gold leaves. Through the illusion and reflection of the light in a gilt technique from the medieval Icon, a visual illusion is created not only in the works of flat canvas but also in the form of 'Plane Object' beyond two-dimension, which has attracted a great deal of attention from many museums and collectors.

 

Her work that concludes with light is realized by a repetitive and systematic installation of uniform hexahedrons or geometric panel boxes on the wall. The plane object of the artist, named after its objectification of the painting’s surface, focuses on a spatial expansion using the reflection of gold leaf. The visible and invisible from the collision of light and matter and the ambiguity between the material and non-material induce viewers with a wondrous visual experience of light and color.

 

This exhibition includes her new planar work along with the plane objects. The new work is reduced to planes again from objects, and its space is segmented by diagonal lines crossing within where it recalls the refraction of the light passing through a prism. If the cheerful and lenient lyricism of the color embraced by the light in the plane object alleviates the strict orders in its composition and the rigidity of its rules, the two-dimensional work emphasizes rather crisp lines in its geometric abstraction. The plane objects constantly change throughout different space and time as their internal light and the external lights (artificial and natural lights) intermingle. This exhibition expects a variety of delicate spaces that reach beyond dimensions – a specific variation in the exhibition space.

​

​

The expanded realm of painting: Plane Object

Rectangular objects are regularly and repeatedly arrayed horizontally and vertically on the wall. Considering that the work is in between painting and objects, we immediately imagine the offhand objects of Donald Judd, however, by looking at the details, we can see that it is quite different from the minimalist concept of industrial production, emphasizing the immediacy of objectivity. In other words, Park’s work is the result of a time-consuming manual in a repetitive process of overlaying and polishing. It is an important point to understand her work methodology that she is able to skillfully handle materials with a traditional painting spirit. Adhering to the fundamentals of painting, she faithfully revives the materials and gilt techniques of medieval Icon. Thin gold leaves on each side of the object are carefully polished like a mirror for the maximum light reflection while the front side is applied with pale or robust colors.

 

The visual effect of these colors maximizes the character of painting as a whole. Above all, the reflection of light caused by the collision between the protruding object and the golden light from its sides leads to the extension of a newly created space. This visually unifies each object and suggests the overall figure and atmosphere of the work. Various illusions of light are generated depending on the viewpoint, and a flattened spatiality is ensured as a whole beyond the properties of each part. As if Mark Rothko's colors has toned down to translucent and a thin fog, her work floats in front of our pupils. Hence, the division between the part and the whole and the plane and the three-dimensional body becomes meaningless. These plane objects are extended paintings that share the context of color-field painting as a combination of color in their constitutive order.

"Painting is a virtual one. It exists only for vision, and painting becomes a pure visual space. It is nothing but an illusion.” - The Problems of Art, Susanne K. Langer

 

 

Vision and Light: Between materiality and illusion

“Lucis naturahuiusmodi est, ut non in numero, non in mensura, non in pondere aut alio, sed omnis eius in aspectu gratia fit.”   Hexaëm, 147 v., Grosseteste

 

An elegant light that delicately spreads from within - it is a wondrous light in which the only emitter is just the thin gold leaves. There is no use of electricity though it seems like a strong power source is embedded in it. The variation of light is harmonized with each unit color and brings an illusory visual effect. In other words, the reflected light and the shadow interact with each other to generate an impression in the space, creating lines, creating heterogeneous spaces, and creating a variety of rich spaces. Whereas Dan Flavin fixed the light (from electricity) to produce a space with colors, the plane objects coexist harmoniously with the romantic golden color achieved without such power source. Park’s work is a metaphor for life that dreams of a harmony of contradictions and contradictions.

 

Light creates a special world of immaterial beauty. According to the artist, 'the object loses its properties and sublimes into a completely different existence when it bears light', similar to the halo of medieval art that conquered reality, the strictness of the radiant and radiant light of the Gothic cathedral. Based on the sacred light of Tempera with a golden background, her plane object is to affect us through art in a meditative atmosphere.

​

Ju Yeon Kang

Director Gallery JJ

​