NYAB Event - Dunam Choi “Vision for the world of unseen”

Dunam Choi “Vision for the world of unseen”

Kips Gallery

This event has ended.

The painting that launches Du Nam Choi’s show is Untitled from 2009, in which horizontal bands of the most delicious colors streak over the top of a white base. Is there any greater delight for us viewers than to trace our eyes over liquid brushstrokes of plum, persimmon, and cobalt (plus the occasional visual treat of two colors per stroke)? Every luscious stroke makes a left to right journey. Some strokes are short and definitive, others wavering and languorous, and a few uncertain and truant. The richness of color makes me nostalgic for Morris Louis and Clyfford Still, but Du Nam’s pictures more closely evoke an earlier era. Look at the colored roadway in Kandinsky’s Autumn in Bavaria for a parallel, or at the flowing sky in Munch’s The Scream, if that passage can properly be separated from the rest of the picture.
Pencil-thin drips emerge in his pictures from 2012. Often they descend from a red band acting like a gutter of sorts that runs across the tops of the canvases, creating large comb-like environments.
Increasingly in his recent work he explores the possibilities of joining his two techniques, the skinny drip and the luscious stroke. In one canvas, there is a beautiful liquid screen of deep ultramarine that opens up portals in which treacly drips cover over patches of bright color. In another, it is as if he has taken his original fluid brushstrokes and then shortened them into daubs and dashes that issue forth their own drips. Finally, in Du Nam’s Sweet Encounter paintings, the daubs and dashes expand into floating landscape islands, and, if we follow that analogy to a world in miniature, the drips that drop beneath the islands of color are like taproot structures seeking the ground.
Du Nam’s paintings would seem to bear scant resemblance to his architecture, which is committed to crisp geometric form. But in both his painting and his architecture (I’ll take the Buam-dong house to be representative), he takes an interest in an overall spatial order that is kinetic and in thought-provoking relationship with nature. His paintings and buildings both celebrate the possibilities of materials: acrylic, cement, glass, wood. They toggle between substance and void in aesthetic ways. “Pictures” get generated by door frames, window frames, and canvas frames. And in both his painting and his architecture he believes in signature gestures—shall we call them strokes?—that are at the heart of the matter.