[Project. 002] Intimacy of the Surface

    The idea of a surface as a flat, neutral ground on which things may or may not happen, boundless, unmarked and prepared for all kinds of fertile activity, is difficult to shake off. The painter’s white canvas is the freshly plowed field, ready to be cultivated, and I can almost smell the wet soil! While this sense of land cultivation has a role to play, the intimacy of this exhibition invites us, ever so subtly, to dig a little deeper. A surface - no matter how paper-thin - is also always already a layer. And when it is thought of as a layer, it is perhaps at its most productive.

 

    Digging deeper, we can think of the surface geologically as a meeting point between two strata, two layers of sedimentary rock, which are deposited over time. As particles carried by rivers and seas slowly settle down on the ocean floor, they begin to solidify and form permanent bonds. The site of activity on which this process hinges, lies between the layer of sediment particles, which is more fluid, and the layer of sedimentary rock in which all particles are now immobile, fixed in stone. It is at this in-between layer, the meeting point between one kind of surface and another, where the physical and chemical reactions happen. Like a two-faced god of old, the surface of stratification is always a double surface, facing two directions at once. On the one hand, the surface of stratification looks towards the stone and the permanent bonds it is creating, on the other hand, it is continually open to the influx of new material. The exhibition, “Intimacy of the surface” engages with this double kind of layering, the activity harboured by its surfaces always turning in two directions at once. 

 

    Sediment is the mud Dominik Styk refers to in his series of fabric objects. Their twisted coils act like dirt particles that darken my nails as I squish them through my fingers. The worker’s hand, a farmer’s. But also more like a small child’s. The work is playful: toys, puppets, hats. I can pick up a work, or kick it aside, as the sediment here is still in flow, before it is settled and fixed. Mud can be thought of allegorically, as a symbol for the ambiguities of our inner life, the messy emotions and silly dreams we are burdened with. This mental mud turns to the stories which in turn define us, but mud can always be extracted back, even when it has been crystallised to mineral form. Janus-like, Styk’s work is located both at the fluid beginning and fixed end of the sedimentation process, when he extracts mud particles back from rock. 

 

    Things grow in the work of Chunkook Lee, things from the natural world like delicate flowers and thorny branches, rising from the hard grey surfaces of his polymer clay reliefs. And it might seem his is a cultivation of these surfaces, only looking one way, forward, to when the harvest comes and things have fully grown. But his work too retains mud’s fluidity, the plasticity of clay, continually pulsing beneath its plastic skin. Lee refers to video games and the way this world is constructed virtually as an algorithm, capable of generating entire dynamic ecosystems with which we can interact. It also has a strong mystical element, the work described as acting as a totem, which replaces nature with its image, spiritually connecting the two together. 

 

    Elsewhere, Jieun Kim embraces the ornamental in her abstract paintings. Undulating lines curve to form scrolls: “rocaille” in the French style, but in its 1950s Disney reincarnation, with elements modelled on nature intertwined in complex designs of pastel blues.  She often draws on everyday visual encounters, here, the familiarity of the Cinderella animated film. However, the construction of her painting is influenced by her background in classical music, guided by a rhythm of question and response to material conditions, paying close attention to the smallest shift in texture, the whisper of linen grain. Her scrollwork, like musical ornaments - the trill, mordent or turn - accents and distinguishes forms, but also connects them with a line together. She sets in motion a double flow, both inward and outward looking, material and temporal.  

 

    In Ginam Yeom’s work, the surface is not simply double layered, it is porous. The overlapping layers of painting are used, not to define the structure of a tree, but to follow the light as it passes through physical substance, the twigs and branches interconnecting fractal patterns of stone powder.  Geology is still at stake, as his layering process establishes a space which is not of cultivation, defined and measured, but of intensities lying beneath cracked surfaces, associated with material flows, light waves and temperature differences. That he describes temperature as “nameless” in his title is important as in a sense, all temperature is nameless, a quality that can be sensed in continuous variation, rather than measured in degrees. We can only know how heat feels, how light travels through air. These are lines that bypass points, always moving in the in-between. 

 

    Double layering is at work culturally in the collaborative practice of Rojo & Kreß. Their painting “Pacifico de mi amor,” explores the historic and economic relations inscribed in architecture, using a half-timbered 1924 house in the Chilean coastal town of Zapallar as a starting point. This house is modelled after the medieval Butchers Guild Hall in Hildesheim, its structure and ornamentation transferred from one cultural context to another. As a cultural object, it faces these two directions at once: on the one hand, Europe, its land of origin, in which its design fulfilled a certain symbolic function, and on the other, Chile, in which its now decontextualised construction gained new meaning. It also sits at a complicated junction of economic relations and capital flows, wealth generated from the Chilean export of saltpetre - mineral sodium nitrates - back to Europe, allowing for the house to be build. This Chilean “Caliche” is formed naturally in the Atacama desert’s acrid environment, where nitrates settle with the sea fog and are transported by the El Niño rains, slowly crystallising into mineral-rich veins. 

 

    Intimacy occurs in the haptic detail of the surface: a twist of tightly woven fabric, a polymer rendered so fine, that the plastic resembles skin, two pastel blues just touching in ornament. 

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Text by Magdalena Wisniowska