DEPARTURES JINCHUL KIM
DEPARTURES Recent Paintings and Mixed Media Installation by Jinchul Kim April 16 – May 19, 2012 Atrium Gallery
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JINCHUL KIM ARTIST STATEMENT
As we all co-exist with the unpredictable complexities in our lives, art allows me to encapsulate my life experiences with the world I constantly perceive. Thus, I endeavor to create paintings that are not mimetic, but rather an amalgamation of what I see in the lives around me and how my own peculiar circumstances have distorted these discernments. This hybrid—as I call it—of what exists and how I see it to exist has been the focal point of my sensibility. I am constantly in a struggle between these two erratic truths, and perhaps it is my physical predicament that has made this more powerful for me. Consequently, the muse for my work is the momentary images from daily accidents that I capture into my mind. They are the random impacts and revelations that I distinguish from a casual occurrence. They are the transitional afterthoughts completely stilled in time, all of which are skewed by how I experience them and frozen in anecdotal ways for my art making process. I am not interested in approaching these hybrids with “Collage” form of physically visible procedures. I’d rather chase them by means of drastic and highly mastered formal treatments. I use fine marks, not necessarily for constructing shapes or describing the plasticity of the image depicted, but to discard illusionary characteristics. I do not trick the process of my work with smudged illusions that are decorated by some intensities of chroma. In other words, I do not have any intention of manipulating paints or the surface of picture planes to create a rich painterly fantasy. I direct my brush marks to dissect the substance of the subject matter. So they are distributed by particles of hues, implied equally, and applied by other formal commands for their necessities. These marks may be conceptual, but to me it is my narrative calligraphy.
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NANCY MITCHELL
Jinchul Kim’s numinous paintings inspire in the viewer instinctive reverence for these sacred testimonials which bear witness to achingly vulnerable human privacies in which the deepest, most authentic moments of being are revealed. Faces, streetlights disassemble from the quotidian as Kim’s subjects are suspended in author Kundera’s “unbearable lightness of being” between the definitions and limitations of the past and the unknown potential of the future, that brief, mystical moment before choices are made that will cast the trajectory of fate. With absolute discipline, devotion and fidelity, Kim does not simply paint, but rather invokes, raises, and calls forth from the very fabric of the canvas every molecule until the primal, originating emotion is incarnate, and the painting, begotten, not made, transcends its materials, breathes and lives. We who are privileged to be in the presence of this phenomenon experience, however briefly, Negative Capability that poet Keats defined as the capacity to be “… in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” We no longer feel the need to speculate on the past or future of the subjects in these paintings, but inhabit a graced present. As a result, we too are transformed from observer to participant in these exquisitely rendered moments, segments and fragments that woven together create the fabric of our collective, truly authentic, human lives. Jinchul Kim’s paintings move us out of and beyond ourselves and we are never the same. Nancy Mitchell teaches at Salisbury University and is the author of two books of poetry, The Near Surround (2002) and Grief Hut (2009).
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Departure – Starting Over 2012 oil on canvas 26 x 31 inches
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Departures – Continuum 2011 oil on canvas 29 x 46 inches
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Departure – Cara Walking 2012 oil on canvas 30 x 46 inches
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Departure – Nocturne in Pink II 2012 oil on canvas 26 x 44 inches
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Adolescence II 2012 oil on canvas 28 x 40 inches
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Segment – I’m Still Blue 2011 oil on canvas 24 x 46 inches
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Segment – She Couldn’t Make Herself Used to It II 2011 oil on canvas 22 x 35 inches
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Departure – You Can’t Go Home Again 2012 mixed media installation 76 x 52 x 14 inches
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