Foyers — Yoo Hye-Sook — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 3 → June 16, 2018

You have never been there and you will never go, but you know this place although it does not exist.

Contradictory, yes and no. In her recent works, Yoo Hye-Sook suggests a space, a location she knows without knowing it, a place that isn’t one, but provokes a reaction. For her, it’s about the exploration of an indefinite, born from the simple pleasure of hearing and seeing the pencil go over the canvas.

A space, resulting from the meeting of matters: first the artist lays matte black acrylic backgrounds on which thousands of graphite lines reveal surfaces on the surface that little by little become perspectives that create a place: a wall, an opening, what one discerns as a room, an anonymous angle. But soon, this vision reverts into a nameless abstract geometric composition as the surrounding light interacts with the artwork all the time playing tricks on perception ; a vision appears and then morphs. The shiny graphite matter captures and reverberates light while creating the luminosity that allows the geometric shapes to “emerge” from the black surface.

What is at stake here? The artist says she’s looking for a type of void, undetermined, an artwork that stays open enough to give way to imagination. Hers first and then the viewer’s. Black is a darkness that unifies, that unites whereas light separates and enables to discern. In life they alternate; both are indispensable.

Yoo Hye-Sook wants to awaken our senses by providing bridges between the two through these places where we don’t entirely see, where we think we see. When she creates, she slowly moves forward on the black surface feeling her way, shaping while observing. A process which is sensual and instinctive, animal.

For this new work, the artist drew inspiration from Edward Hopper’s paintings such as Morning sun (1952) and Sun in an empty room (1963). Moved by these artworks — in which Yoo Hye-Hook particularly loves the light she first takes up the composition principle eliminating human presence to only leave a bed and the sunlight on the walls. She then focuses on a detail to finally move on to the creation of other spaces. Emptied of human presence, these places, these “nowheres” and “everywheres” seem nevertheless inhabited. Like the dark water of a lake which surface glissens with the reflecting light and to which the rhythm of the currents bring a breathing movement, Yoo Hye-Sook’s works give the feeling of being animated by invisible lungs. As if the artist had inscribed in it this big breath of nature that stimulates us without us necessarily being aware of it. By working with matters, she brings to life something invisible, original, hard to name, something along what connects us beyond time and substance. It is this presence that carries us, such as the desire of a reunion, in the same way that her previous works with hair or her fur topographies instilled an irresistible desire to touch, to immerse ourselves.

Through these artworks which seem minimalist and almost inscrutable, Yoo Hye-Sook manages to awaken more primary registers, activate our senses, while offering a foray towards an elsewhere. A respite and a reminder.