REALTIART

We live in the era of multi-media and get lots of random images that are undistinguishable from what we consider as a work of art nowadays. Visual images from movies and TV dramas seem to be unmemorable and look same as the plot of them seems to be similar to one another. It is true that a work of art, such as a painting, a poem and a song that should be original and creative, has a lot of influences from the past. In that aspect, every image belongs to the present as well as every artwork is a parody. Indeed, the charm of parody is that it evokes various emotions like what we feel about an old friend and old songs, etc.

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My artwork started with my yearning for the colors that once were covered on old statues that I imagine. While making a composition for my still-life painting with props like a white plaster head, which is a fake mass produced goods, my imagination for the original color of the first Venus got bigger. Now I try to make paintings reflecting all kinds of emotions that colors evoke. Using references, such as images from movies, TV dramas, those of the masters’ artwork and some old black and white pictures that I randomly choose on the internet makes me yearn for other dimensions even though I feel as if I was a ghost writer writing about others’ story.  

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A painting can be valued differently as time goes by, alluding a lot of things, such as random objects, people, events and other artworks in the history of art. It has temporality and spatiality that can be marked by a fundamental paradox, which inspired me to think of a painting referencing Goya’s Black paintings and various patterns reflecting the circumstances that we face in our daily lives.

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‘Fantastic Vision’ is the title of the series of my recent works. It is one of the 14 Black Paintings that the Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya made from the later years of his life. They depict intense, haunting themes, reflective of both his fear of insanity and his bleak outlook on humanity. Due to his illness, the Napoleonic Wars and the turmoil of the changing Spanish government, Goya developed an embittered attitude toward mankind, which might have led to his production of the Black paintings. Living in a secluded place, he applied oil paints directly on the walls of his dining and sitting rooms, and created works under dark, disturbing themes. The paintings were not commissioned and were not meant to leave his home. It is likely that he never intended the works for public exhibition, which makes me wonder if a painting is an interior monologue that heals the artist as well as it is a monologue that influences the audiences somehow. As the Black paintings reveal the true color of the bleak world at that time, Goya must have chosen them as a means to heal himself like a lot of artists under the chaos of the Corona pandemic these days sublimate their fear into a work of art while locking themselves to socially distance.

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Yellow ochre, gold, brown, grey and black are the colors used for the Black paintings Only the occasional white shines from clothes to give contrast or the rare stroke of blue from the sky or green from a landscape. Most scenes of the Black paintings are nocturnal and with a stark absence of light like an ominous, gloomy and earth-toned illustration depicting Goya’s fearful inner state, which gives me an urge to make them as colorful as a rainbow, a spectrum of hope. 

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Reinterpreting various artworks and using random images as a reference on my canvas while making a harmony of colors in my own order, I’d like to remind the viewers of the temporality in art, which is about how we perceive time and space of a work of art that belongs to the present all the time. 

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-Kim Yoon Kyung