On Rho Eunjoo's Solo Exhibition Walking-Aside
Walking-Aside, a solo exhibition of Rho Eunjoo was held at Space Willing N Dealing in December 2019. This was Rho's second solo exhibition to be held at Space Willing N Dealing. The first one was Situation/leaning against, shown in 2013 when Space Willing N Dealing had recently opened in Gyeongridan area, Seoul. I was able to stay tuned to the flow and changes in Rho’s work, because she continued to participate in projects and exhibiions at Space Willing N Dealing since then. Not only is Rho’s way of expressing her subject remarkable, she is also an artist with a sold grasp of a logical concept in the composition of her images. Therefore, when a sense of change in the direction of her work became evident, I wanted to see Rho’s work in an exhibition in the newly moved space.
Rho’s paintings are representational, meaning that there is a definite subject that’s depicted in her work. The subject of focus in her first solo exhibition was the structure of apartment buildings and their environment, which is something of everyday life for the artist. In terms of form, the apartment building is a collection of geometric lines and planes, and socially, it’s an object of desire for possession as a symbol of wealth, subject of investment, and associated with capital. For Rho, the apartment evokes a fleeting and temporary existence; so she would refer to the photographs in the media, and depict architectural ruins that are demolished, devoid of function, useless and remaining merely as matter. Upon capturing such scantly supported and collapsing structures on the surface of her works, the artist began to make models of the apartments in paper in her studio. They’re then modeled as sculptural objects. Rho would fold thin fragile paper and place it on the table, then draw it as a solid lump of plaster in her work. She would draw it as a structure in which lines meet to form a plane and planes meet to form a particular angle. Objects the artist makes or are found around her are placed in certain places or in confined places like the desk in the artist’s studio, either in one or in numbers, and objectified and depicted. Such experimentations expanded into questions as to what possibilities lie in the relationships formed between space created in painting and space in reality.
A number of objects that are placed on the shelves in Rho’s studio are depicted in the canvases in Walking—Aside. To direct her subject, the artist models her subject into a three-dimensional form, positions it in her work-table space, decides on a precise composition, then brings all this process together on her canvas. This image has been created by taking precise measurements of the space in Space Willing N Dealing, then simulating the relationship between the image, space, and the audience. The size of the actual objects is amplified according to the size of the canvas, and the work depicts a certain depth in space, as deep as the width of the table on which the objets are placed, creating a small stage-like space as intended by the artist. The audience wandering around the exhibition space comes to recognize the extended from the paintings.
Rho’s sense of composition reminds me Giotto di Bondone’s murals in the Scrovegni chapel. Even though the narrative is removed and only space and objets remain in Rho’s work. It’s evident that the Rho’s work borrows the expression of the concept of space dramatically introduced by the early Renaissance artists at the time, in that there is a sense of experiencing the actual material in Rho’s work. From the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, there were attempts to take off from the absolute unrealism of the Middle Ages, observing and portraying the subject in a realistic way. The smooth texture characteristic of Rho’s work, the flat plants and rocks, portrayal of buildings, and the sense of space with very little difference in field of depth, all seem to reproduce a theatrical stage. In Rho’s work, these elements are observed and applied in a playful way.
Rho’s work sheds light on the relationship between flat and sculptural, which is clearly evident in the drawing series Night and Day presented in this exhibition. This series demonstrates the stage that lies before the paper models composed in grid-like modules, used as the subject of Rho’s painting, before the production of the model. A space realized in a drawn form, this geometric compositional form wherein the line is also a plane, aptly demonstrates Rho’s attempts to establish the relationship between space and object, and painting and viewer. If one saw Rho’s 2018 drawing work Grey Side, which preceded her recent series of drawings, one would be easy to see how the connecting and extending of lines form planes, and how the relationship between such planes with other planes and space have been forming.
Many painters of Rho’s generation are pursuing and discussing research on the ‘abstract’. There are intense discourses about the concept of “abstract painting” in terms of the differentiation strategy from the “Abstract” in Modern era; the traces of the flat surface, colors, dense overlapping, and nontypical images through the exploration of the abstract emphasize the sense of painting. Meanwhile her work is faithful to modeling the subject and thoroughly staging them, directing at another possibility in painting. In this exhibition, Rho proposes a much-anticipated and exciting possibility in forming a relationship between reality and image.
Text by Kim Inseon (Space Willing N Dealing)