Hyunsun Jeon — Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris
Impossible encounters between objects and the modes of production of those very objects, the paintings of Hyunsun Jeon (born 1989), exhibited at Galerie Lelong, strike one first by the way they blend simplicity with complexity.
Hyunsun Jeon — Here and There @ Lelong & Co. Matignon Gallery from March 20 to April 30. Learn more Memory, geometry, and metaphysics intertwine in constructions that draw upon art, craft, and technology. These works seem at once to echo shared memories and to invent their own language—composing dreamlike landscapes with classical grace while upending the codes of representation, daring approximation with virtuosity. It is a powerful and deeply thoughtful body of work, one that continuously reinvents itself from canvas to canvas while maintaining a profound coherence within its scattered order.In this sense, the richness of Hyunsun Jeon’s work could be compared to the complex and polysemous notion of impression: both in the sense of printing—a mechanical act whose process we can only partially control—and in the affective sense, that diffuse mark imprinted between memory and imagination, to which our encounter with art exposes us. Here, the radical nature of abstraction is softened by the intensity of the gesture, deliberately stretching the power of approximation. Throughout the exhibition, volumes and angles multiply, shifting from an initial monumental and immersive panel structure to the free play of an airy composition, or one that entirely covers the wall.
The formats vary, but the focus—always elusive—never quite settles, adding to the illusion the whimsical sensation of a display that encloses, evades, or catches up with its viewer.
This plural movement is entirely contained within the unique balance that governs each of Hyunsun Jeon’s works. Throughout her practice, layers and volumes support one another without touching, accumulate without constraint, and destabilize the established order of reality. The cone, a true leitmotif of her work, appears now as motif, now as support, sometimes as actor, other times as organizer of these landscapes—treating nature through the trace it leaves upon our imagination.
Trees, skies, fruits, flowers, and architectural elements structure these fragments of consciousness where the potential for a narrative can be sensed—yet one also perceives the reflection of a dead-end within the stories we will go on to invent in the nights to come. And the cone itself becomes the troubling symbol of this: evoking, implicitly, the possibility of a passage—a “nail driven into reality,” whose purpose is uncertain. Does it open communication between the real and the dreamed, or does it mark, in a dead end, their failed encounter?
For once again, the question here is one of the meeting of regimes, of our consciousness’s ability to embrace—upon waking, still full of its dream logic—the materiality of a world whose every element is inherently separate. Then, these scribbles and sketches—which evoke both the fragility of the hand and the precision of digital drawing, made up of pixels that, on close inspection, reveal a strange fluidity—become, in turn, so many possible promises of impressions yet to come. And perhaps, in the fragile balance of a suggested form, lies the space for the viewer’s imagination: to continue, from their side of the cone, the spectacle of this gap between imagination and materiality.
In this way, perhaps, this daring and rare form of painting rediscovers a primary definition of Impressionism: Claude Monet’s wish to relegate the motif to the background—“What I want to reproduce is what exists between the motif and me.”
