“They look like rocks.”[1]
Flat lump, weighty circle, flat rectangle, crumpled without rules, standing alone, suddenly destroyed. “They look like rocks. Like tree branches.” What captures Rho Eunjoo’s attention in the city landscape are things that are used up and discarded, or forms of things that are useless or eliminated. Things like ‘long and blunt’ shapes of rocks, lines of ‘chaff-like’ broken tree branches, ‘flatly folded’ architectural facades. Why is she so drawn to such things that have nothing but their skin left? Perhaps an introduction to the forms that Rho draws is the very first way of explaining the exhibition Walking—Aside.
A landscape at a glance or a still life, what sits atop the surface of Rho’s
work is definitely as sculptural as it is painterly. If the antonym of ‘theatrical’ is ‘natural’, this situation composed by matters of impossible scale is more or less theatrical. As is with traditional medium, Rho’s work seems to remain a subject of contemplation and begin at the moment of the gaze, it’s also tactile and marks the index beyond the surface. The index in the work, with many inexplicable elements, demonstrates its incomprehensibility and builds up tension in the viewer. Rho’s smooth and thin images, applies standard tactics that are faithful only to reproduction with the element of the matière unique to painting removed, producing intense and impossible landscape in the most neutral grey tones.
Rho’s interest in the form that captures our gaze goes through a process of a type of pre-production before it’s officially implemented as a painting. The form is drawn 2-dimensionally and modeled 3-dimensionally into small sculptural forms. Once the form is then simulated as miniatures in space, the artist finally picks up her brush. The process of going back and forth 2D and 3D and adjusting scale and finding balance more or less requires attention to detail, and is also a process that allows the intervention of chance elements such as gravity, weight and wind. It’s a moment of realizing that the most important purpose of pre-production does not solely lie in realizing what there is in reality. On the contrary, the artist goes on further and distorts the symbolic scale of things and familiar rule of perspective, and downgrades their form. And she creates an index that cannot and does not exist in this world, despite the fact that it has been constructed through an infallible system of measurement. One might say that it’s a scene that’s possible solely in a picture or on a stage.
“It’s like a shadow puppet play”
If making artwork is a process of materially manifesting and making visible the artist’s senses and thoughts, Rho takes detours around a straight path, through a process of ‘Walking’. It’s like taking a detour around the ‘phenomenon/situation intervention’ that comes from the state that’s invisible to the eye. It’s constructed through engineered tools, modeled through sculptural means, then the image is finally created with eliminated emotions, through the most sensitive medium of the paint brush. And what’s left there is the shell of form, which then soon leads to the analogy of the emotions felt by the artist. This was perhaps an indirect (but perhaps the most intimate) way of expressing the challenges the artist felt by the rapidly changing situations surrounding her, and situations that were described through words like physical anxiety, tension or condolence. The unsettling grey sentiment is projected on the view of the things in the city and landscape, and the artist chose, as a way of delivering such sentiment to others, drawings that eliminate as much sentiment as possible.
Rho brings together things that have no control of their own because they’re overwhelming in their scale rather than in beauty, as well as things that are discarded and isolated, from apartment buildings just before occupation, to construction material, and broken tree branches and pencil lead. This way, Rho reenacts the world, playing with scale. The matchbox-like buildings when the city is seen from bird’s eye view, or their length is the very stage the artist has set up, and the depth captured in the image. The main characters on that stage are the still life of the city that would have melted, shattered and vanished. It’s like a shadow play. And this is the two-sided world and the ‘Aside’ of the stage that Rho is showing in this exhibition.
“The second decision to illuminate the subject”
From the illusory space of infinite depth to the real surface of the canvas, painting has expanded into a form that affects and is affected by its actual environment. Now, painting is no longer recognized as a plane, and the exhibition no longer stagnates at merely discussing images but expands to offering the situation directed in its space, as well as conceptual and material experiences. As an exploration into the expansion of painting, this exhibition attempts to draw in space into the plane, rather than bringing paintings into the physical space. If the images that are positioned at a certain height in the exhibition space are seen as ‘windows’, they would function as channels through which to observe the world that lies beyond them. The floor and walls are drawn, appropriately separated from the main character, as “the second decision to illuminate the subject”. They may not be the background in the image but function as something close to it. Such floor and walls successfully give the illusion of a ‘shallow depth’, but function more as a stage that makes things (main character) stand out more than the space. The mimesis in the shape of the rocks enlarged as much as a human figure, and the shape of buildings diminished as low as to touch human foot, lies on the surface of the works, while attempting to traverse here and there. The three-sided and four-sided forms referenced in this exhibition are read as the concept of expansion of a fixed frame called the canvas, and mediate as a device that implies dynamic painting. This exhibition, which presents works as a series but also as independent works, stirs up experiences of tension and balance in the audience, through things that grow immensely in size with steps taken forward, along with the images of things they see when they turn around. Walking—Asidecompletely exposes the isolated things that have clearly existed in between the definite scenes. They are the urban landscapes that disappear and appear suddenly without any knowledge, and the collective-drama of Rho’s paintings of things.
Text by Jihyun Shin (Independent Curator)
[1] The subtitle of this text which explains the exhibition and the artist’s work has been taken from the conversation between the writer and the artist.