Energy and Entropy

In his post-formalist essay titled Painting as Model (1993), the art historian and critic Yve-Alain Bois asks, “What is it for a painter to think?” This is an especially interesting comment when discussing the subject of pure abstraction. Since there is no discernible signifier that one can detect in non-figurative work, the question that Bois raises is consequently that much more intellectually demanding not only for the critic, but for the artist who self-reflexively ponders this as well. Bois challenges one-dimensional readings of pure abstraction where form is strictly perceived as an embodiment of emotionality. This idealism concerns notions of beauty and transcendence taken to a level of singularity. Some artists who work in the mode of pure abstraction can marry aesthetics, poetry and thought to create something of artistic presence: David Reed and his pictorial insertions into the work of Alfred Hitchcock, for example; the push-pull of accumulation and dispersal and the two- against three-dimensionality of the early work of Fabian Marccacio; the squeegee-like abstractions of Gerhard Richter that engage painting’s historicity, or one of my all time favorites are the punctuated and slashed monochromes of Lucio Fontana. Younger artists have been cognizant of these historical and contemporary examples while taking Bois’ question to task, occasionally riffing with the modality of pure abstraction into interesting formal and conceptual avenues. One of these artists is Joo Hyun Kang, exemplified in a body of work titled Encrustation and Entropy (2003).

Encrustation and Entropy consists of twenty-one panels whose surfaces are textured with what appear to be detritus and discard. What create these textures are gold paste and flake medium as well as mica; these, in turn, are allowed to achieve a delicate patina creating what theoretically is an open-ended work. The work remains open-ended in that the panels are left to the mercy of the vicissitudes of time. Similar to Warhol’s “Oxidation” paintings, Kang’s works are more than just an aesthetic endeavor, of a conceptual convergence of the spatial and the temporal. She states that they make manifest philosophical ideas of being/becoming and their other in the entropy of dissolution. Apart from this narrative dichotomy they can also be hyper-real in their simulation
of geological marvel. This geological trope hits an ironic register when Kang has installed her work on the ground outdoors as installation. The panels are placed on the earth and become auto-referential simulacra; the works’ formal and conceptual punning are made more so in referencing objects of antiquity that have been unearthed. Patina never sleeps, and as it accumulates and transforms the panels to a level akin to bronze statuary there is also something almost kitsch-like in their luminescence. This luster is further heightened by the point/counterpoint
inherent in the panels’ repetitive affect that can be slightly vertiginous as they oscillate between surface texture and an enveloping chromatic density.

While their delicate minutia beckons closer inspection, the twenty-one panels have a tendency to over power one when they are mounted on a wall. There is also a certain liberty taken to their vertical/horizontal display, since one is given a curatorial license as to what panel goes where. Exhibited in a grid like fashion, Encrustation and Entropy simultaneously trope and pay homage to one of modernism’s sacred cows: the gird. Yet the gird has traditionally concerned itself with the severance of form and narrative, of the aesthetic and the social. This is what seems to have been lost in overly deterministic readings of non-representational art, the ideology of transcendence serves to reiterate a New Age version of the retrograde “art for art’s sake” exegesis; ditto for the discussions around beauty as it raises its politically ugly head. But Kang seems to be aware of such metaphysical de-sublimation and its attendant ideological hubris. She compositionally counters this through the what Michael Podro once called the
“manifold of perception.” For the viewer of Encrustation and Entropy is engaged between an optical consciousness via the seduction of the panels’ palpable details, and a phenomenological awareness via their sheer physicality; a materiality that nonetheless shifts between density and levity. Materiality for Kang is never an end in itself; mimicking a type of random precision in the quasi-happenstance look of the discard elegantly placed in disarray on the painting’s surface, one is reminded of a poetic formalism that has not lost its critical edge. Painting has never looked so paradoxically intuitive yet tactical, so retinal yet haptic, and concomitantly earth-bound and ethereal.

The work consists ontology. mYet because the works are so heavily textured, are somewhat monochromatic, and consists of twenty-one panels, they add it is in these liminal spaces where pure abstraction begins to achieve y are long lost through oxidation they also ingenious through the cial and abreminiscent of what underpinning, are concrete hci The panels’ surf. Yet materiality for her is not strictly an aesthetic decision. This not to imply that her works lack a visual presence; in fact they shift between a demure sensuousness and borderline ornamentation. Yet the because the panels are encrusted with an broad array of material sources including oxides that they  because, It is in these liminal spaces, between form and narrative only between where painting n gthat between the poetics and Certainly they evoke a slew these surfaces are reside somewhere between hrerdies : the Russian Constructivists and their political reading of abstraction which is antithetical to their Theosophical colleagues, the perpetuity of painting’s discourse, which for some appears to ebb and flow akin to a “deja vu all over again,” has motivated me to call this phenomenon as the “return of the return to painting.” Discussions of usually taken The rereading of social dimension of form, which was the accumulation and application of social discard and detritus on painting’s surface is also the formal and theoretical province of a recent group of paintings by Joo Hyun Kang.

The aptly titled Encrustation and Entropy (2003) consists of a group of panels whose foci are not only strategic serialization and random order, but they palpitate between detailed minutia and enveloping sublimity. But as one begins to visually meander across the surface of these paintings, one witnesses a kind of planar transmutation, a poetic, yet socially infused alchemy for these works in a state of oxidations neginjg to not unlike where binaries of Pure abstraction in this paintings even the tactility. Therapy Others take : panacea. Out the door goes the Constructivists because of their politicization of art; in short, meta imbeciles physicians and evolutionary and theory historical avant-garde painting sort in doing so it fold the possibility of critical discussion into the corner of a redundant subjectivity. A sort of projection of some into the realm of Certainly venture into the realm in the plane abstract The crux of this inquiry rest on the privileging of abstraction as how certain critics have valorized the practice of abstraction as some spiritual quest. This sort of fascist kept of pure abstraction. Certainly in the wake of Hubert damis ask in the wake of Yves-Alain Bois ask The critical seminal essay on the painting.

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