What is painting? A body, a skin. From this simple observation, but amazing in its possible extensions, Hur Kyung Ae drew an aesthetic from the surface and the material.
Far more deeply than the group ‘Supports surfaces’ had imagined, deconstruction is the center of her work, and nothing in this business of undermining will be spared.
The canvas, she paints it with a lot of texture and bright colors, then she cuts them off, scratches, and scarifies or splits them into thin vertical strips, making eligible any subject, or she reduces into patches of painting that are detached from the support and are like the rests of giant surface of scratching.
Sometimes strips hang and curl like tongues of old tapestry. Other times we seem to return to dust, as an end of the world. With Hur Kyung Ae, painting is really set to become disillusioned.
This is primarily a Sade's vision of the work, which nails clawed, which cutter blade sliced, which invisible Fates unraveled ... Beyond informal art, the staining, the setting parcel chips and the surface is a heartbreaking farewell to Western painting, one that is featured in museums and fairs, and which is also taught in Korean universities, in the departments of Western painting. To the whole history of painting, the artist wants to say goodbye, a farewell that has a taste of Apocalypse.
It’s from this calculated demolition of the painting that she made her work, in contemporary art, collecting this precious sawdust, these remnants of a chromatic crumb, as if one should now see the picture differently: in its bare, in-tolerable components, because she knows that the old array is a set up, in its multiple and heterogeneous ingredients, screaming, squealing, creaking, or quantitatively in a more or less consistent heap of colorful waste. This explains its devices to collect traces of this smoke and mirrors: small shelves, as at the bottom of our old blackboards, would gather the precious dust, transforming into bedecked sand this beautiful building. Other times, it is the canvas as she unravels, unmaking the book, like Penelope, rewinding the chromatic ball.
This canvas skin that she cheerfully assaults never searches the figure, but the material. The chromatic material is for her, under an outward impulse, the subject of a deep meditation. Abstract, almost phenomenological painting, restricted to the elements that make painting possible: more or less thick film, frame, woven fabric, color. This abstracted painting, Hur Kyung Ae deepens it, searches it, scarifies it with a strong fantasy that goes from alopecia to phantasmagoria. Far from being in the nostalgia of the old painting, after she has cut and slashed the canvas, she makes wreaths, hair pieces or strips, hair artfully prepared for the trestle transform into waterfalls, whips, new son spurting into space like a spider ... She thus wants to eat our glances trapped into these unreeled webs that the gossamer artist wants to spin otherwise. She makes us cleverly swallow the views we could have on painting, to crush and digest them a different way.
If we look closer, her painting is not a cataclysm of matter: it is composed with great economy, it is tender and fragile, serial and orderly but sometimes magical. Hur Kyung Ae has the sense of fun in the chromatic spray she imposes to eyes, where red and green neon dominate. She also feeds on the color spectrum one reads on Korean temples, the symbolism of colors that make us tick, like a quartered mandala, with the great world. She transforms her paintings into a feast. These are cakes that she makes with the more or less fine grinding of her beaten paintings. A spoon gives us to taste this impossible pittance, to stir the sour cocktail. It collects as a valuable wort, in pompous stemware, the remains of the old daubed: she transforms it into a delicious and futile beverage that she puts into glasses so we can drink to the end of art itself, in a large unmasked of painting-painting, which takes all the colors of the carnival in its intimate mapping.
Have a good trip, Hur Kyung Ae, with this intoxicating feast of Pierre which for once, in the donjuany colors gathered for our eye, has a happy ending: in a dance of happy art, playful, impulsive, explosive, serious and regenerated .
Michel Sicard
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