NYAB Event - Il Lee "New Work at API"

Il Lee "New Work at API"

Art Projects International

This event has ended.

In this major new series, one that has opened up rich new territories for the artist, Il Lee offers a counterpoint to his well-known ballpoint pen ink work and continues his investigations of materials and process that began decades ago.

In the new work, Il Lee creates light with his line; he uses a stylus to rapidly draw through dark indigo oil and to reveal shimmering, pale hues of ground. Also, he works dark on dark, or light on light, to create subtle contrasts of hue and value and allow the visceral quality of the medium, and the physicality of the line’s edge, to be as important as investigations of hue, value and form.

Energy in abundance and in restraint announces itself. Appearing is the same frenetic energy Il Lee has put into, for thirty years, his ballpoint pen work on paper and canvas; furiously active lines are created with athletic vigor and the kind of intense, meditative focus needed to make split second aesthetic decisions. The works and the series also carry great potential energy; the stylus-formed lines are infinitely versatile and the richness of the oil and acrylic media allows for a full exploration of the more painterly aspects of Lee’s work.

Unspoiled galaxies of light pour across expanses of the velvety dark and very large canvas of IW-106 and, in other works, horizons or perhaps event horizons of swirling lines materialize and recede into bright blues, browns and blue blacks. Brilliant red paint and strong white line works like RW-004 are contrasted with the more subtle hue combinations of the creamy white and wintery grey of WB-101. Energetic play and exploration of line and scale are important aspects of the series—dramatic operatic pieces of ten feet in length exist side by side with elegantly ferocious works that belies their small square footage. In a work like TW-091, short marks dominate and, as the stylus made lines take on the quality of a sculptor’s quickly and skillfully carved strokes and as the depth of the warmly hued paint seduces the viewer, the work itself becomes at once drawing, painting, and sculpted panel.

Lee’s oeuvre offers a great breadth of approaches and media as he investigates drawing, the negative and its positive, line and form and of what is rendered and what is there but not rendered. Lee’s monolithic focus has created a universe at once cohesive and yet still expanding in all directions.