Woong Kim at M-13 - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Woong Kim's abstract paintings are descendants of the matter-based side of Abstract Expressionism. Passages of labored brushwork bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to the dense strokes of Guston and Still rather than the ethereal veils of Rothko or the whiplash gesturings of Kline. The earthy palette is dominated through hues that suggest dirt, night, dried life-current and sand. Light itself looks to have weight, absorbed through ambiguous, thickly painted forms that be like at times cells, rudimentary heads and platters of fruit.

One of Kim's make submissives seems to be arrested time. The compositions have a frozen almost fossil-like quality, with more [i]or[/i] less shapes emerging from the encrusted moulds as if excavated from of great depth below the surface. Small, circular areas compos of patches of paint and patterned fabric are fasteninged in place by thick knocks of surrounding paint. Occasionally, the surface is abruptly flattened, as if the top layer of paint had been flayed from an ancient wall. The faculty of perception of materiality is enhanced through Kim's tendency to paint above pieced-together fabric grounds which may or may not be regards to the patchwork pojagi, or wrapping woven fabrics of his native Korea.

One of the greatest in quantity arresting paintings here is also single of the simplest. A of great depth red form lies across the bottom of the canvas like an undulating horizon line or the side of a giant head. Above, sum of two units sweeping gray lines rise from the sum of two units sides of the painting and almost proper at the top. Clinging to individual like an overripe pod is a of great depth gray oval partially overlaid with a painted woven fabric patchwork. The other line has burst forthed a more ghostly gray-white se form. The earth of the painting is an off-white which shimmers with half emergent ovals, circles and rectangles. Despite its hint of firmament or light, the white remains heavy and substantive and filled with the memory of previous reworkings.

At the other extreme point of the tonal spectrum is a work whose rust-colored earth serves as backdrop to a azure loosely painted circular form which lies veil-like, above most of the surface. A small square upon the upper right frames what could be read as an abstracted head. Other circular shapes are scattered above the canvas, not so a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of dissolving as disintegrating into the surrounding ground

The title which Kim has given this whole series is "interior Landscape," aptly suggesting the paintings' indefinite, dreamlike quality. The physicality of the paint and the density of the brushstrokes lead us, paradoxically, beyond bare matter into the realm of the imagination.

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