[Robert C. Morgan, Art Critic] South Korea Painter Ryu Youngsin‥Black Hole Paintings

 

Forest-Black hole No43, 60.6×60.6㎝ Mixed media, 2016. ⓒADAGP

Since I wrote a review on the work of Ryu Young Sin a year ago, her paintings have continued to evolve.  By evolving I mean they have become more open and free in their exploration of experimental form. They are not in the same place they once were. From a critical point of view, I find a certain pleasure in what Ryu is doing today, specifically in a series called Forest–Black Hole. 

These paintings suggest they are the work of an artist emerging from the cocoon of her past. Even if the style and subject matter of these paintings look the same, they are not. While there are always traces or resemblances that make us believe one painting is the same as another, this is rarely if ever the case (unless, of course, it is made intentional). 

 

Forest-Black hole No26, 53×53㎝, Mixed media, 2015. ⓒADAGP

For example, if one carefully studies the work of the mid-twentieth century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, his paintings are always moving from one place to another, even though many would say they look the same.  But they are never exactly the same. This is precisely the point. There are subtle differences in his use of composition in each of his still-life paintings as he shifts the positioning of his angle of vision to accommodate his often-indefinable shapes. 

Moreover, his luminous, yet gentle applications of color within the domain of a special whiteness are remarkable.This reminds me that Ryu also uses a special application of whiteness in relation to blackness in her recent Forest series. 

The comparison is meant to imply that when a painter moves ahead in a personal way from what one may sense in the interior self, rather than the bogus world of entertainment, the artist is capable of discovering something significant. We may recognize the visual vocabulary of an artist where the forms are evolving in a deeply attentive way, where they are coherent, yet at the same moment willfully ambiguous.

 

Forest-Black hole No30, 91×91㎝, Mixed media, 2015. ⓒADAGP 

The latter is often necessary for art to happen, but is rarely, if ever predictable.  Such matters simply fall into place. This is made visible in the artist’s recent abstract tree paintings, which offer enough evidence to suggest her work is moving forward, rather than being in one place. I am impressed by the sense of stillness revealed in each of her paintings. Her focus on the abstract texture of her characteristic tree trucks is most convincing when the texture reveals a low-key expressionist content. 

Through this quality of expressionism we may come to understand that Ryu is painting nature. No longer a simulation of nature as it might have been in the past, the recent work strives to obtain a more direct engagement. Over the past few months, her paint goes more deeply into the dark recesses of nature that may also constitute a metaphor of herself. 

 

Forest-Black hole No20, 53×45㎝, Mixed media, 2015. ⓒADAGP 

Her Forest–Black Hole paintings requires an in-depth gaze, more than a superficial glance. More than just images, her paintings represent a quantum leap into another reality, a searching penetration that reveals a burgeoning of truth that has evolved from her memories of observing nature through actually touching the bark of the trees.  Ryu paints nature as she evolves her craft into art. 

A year ago, I noted the following in the concluding remarks I made on Ryu’s paintings at the time: “It appears that the recent evolution toward trees as bodies and bodies as trees [in her work] creates a curious and engaging ambiguity. Indeed, in the most convincing romantic painting–and here I think of Delacroix– the artist knows how to construct ambiguity in which one thing could be another, and that could be something else. This manner of painting leans most assuredly toward a Modernist aesthetic, which in the work of Ryu Young Shin appears to have found a resonance.”

 

Forest-Black hole No32, 72.7×72.7㎝, Mixed media, 2015. ⓒADAGP 

In writing these words I became aware of a divide in her work. Some of the paintings appeared too involved with Pop Art from a Korean point of view. However, the stronger paintings related to her theme of indelible birch trees were beginning to emerge in a manner I considered closer to a classical form of Modernism. In the latter paintings, the surface of the tree bark began to integrate with the surface of the painting in a curious and confounding manner. 

A feeling of ambiguity had entered her work, which I believed to be provocative and interesting.  One may look at the surface of a painting from the Forest series as if it were the birch bark. In doing so, one might consider the feeling and texture of nature’s evidence in the bark as essential to the tree-ness of the tree, which is perhaps close to a Zen Buddhist idea.

 

Forest-Black hole No34, 91.0×91.0㎝, Mixed media, 2015. ⓒADAGP 

One of the truly magnificent insights in Ryu Young Sin’s new group of paintings is the clarity of her approach as a painter in which her sense of poetic form echoes the dark shades of the forest glade. Here I am struck by the fact she is using traditional mulberry paper mounted on canvas as the surface support on which she paints with oil, a medium she studied several years ago.  

To clarity my point: The artist is painting the bark of the tree on paper that is made from the bark of the tree. Therefore the painted surface on mulberry bark paper is formally consistent with the artist’s reminiscence of the tree that she is in the act of painting. Memory and reality become one.

 

Artist Ryu Young Sin. Photo=Kwon Dong Chul. 

There are particular paintings, of course, worthy of address. I will mention only a few.  Her paintings are cumulatively titled, Forest–Black Hole. It is impossible not to get the message from No. 32, where a bifurcated symmetry of two scratched white biomorphic forms exist side by side in a contingently expressive black space.  

No. 34 has another kind of blackness, less expressive in its application, but still and dense. The white nodules and traces on the bottom edge of this painting are clearly effective. I mention these at the outset in that they come closer to abstractness, moving away from the likeness of the bark forms towards something more fiercely self-determined and fully integrated surface. 

The less literal (or descriptive) the work appears, the better and more successful it appears.  In the all-over style used in paintings No.1 and No.3 hover in space with an intensity that is solid and profound. 

The experimental quality in No.20 suggests an awakening that the painting is within the space being constructed (or deconstructed) before our eyes. No.26 uses color in a way that is paradoxical, barely present and nearly absent, yet coincidentally translucent and magical. It is perfectly understated. No.30 is one of the most coherent paintings in this series, a bountiful and heroic painting, a painting filled with a hopeful qi, and a magical, yet illuminating tenacity. 

[Robert C. Morgan, The Forest – Black Hole Paintings, 2015]

◇Robert C. Morgan

a major international art critic who lives, writes, thinks, paints, and teaches in New York.  Since 1997, he has frequently visited and lectured in Korea. He is the author of many books and essays translated into over twenty languages. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg.