Post 42: Kyoungho Isaac Kim’s untitled painting

There’s a sense received from Isaac Kim’s painting that’s shared with that from observing a body of water. The sense calls attention to the dual nature of a surface and the depth that is beneath it, and the balance within this pair that can be strained but not severed. This painting’s body of water is one through which a rowboat is passing–more narrowly the spot of water over which the boat has just moved–now getting exposed out from under the stern. This spot communicates a feeling of unsteadiness, but only one resulting from, and still connected to, an action that is calm, slow. In this way, the whishing water feels contained by virtue of being determined by the movement of the boat. But what is this boat that doesn’t actually exist in relation to this painting? What of the fact that the only form of boat that could truthfully be at play here is one that is imaginary? Perhaps all that can be talked about of paintings are things that are in imaginary relation to them; that to be able to talk about painting, to give it terms in language, is to require an installation of the imaginary. 

Within this thinking, the imaginary boat moves forward. It smears a row of wishy-washy faces at the painting’s top–heads that recall Marlene Dumas’s portraits in their diluted features and hollow gazes–leaving them rippling and lonely in their cordoned off squares. There’s a quick and rather careless touch to this thick horizontal stripe; it’s clear upon landing in it that all paths point toward the main territory of blue that hangs heavily in the painting’s bottom third. Why? There is a gravity to the color’s richness that has been partially provoked by the scraping of a sponge–the indigo decadence also embodies the fragile hold of a dreamt-up image. Can a dream ever show an answer to the question of "why"? On top of this confused density, a discrete rainbow of square outlines shimmer in their opacity. They sit tidily, noticeably undispersed. These tight squares feel like a close-up acknowledgment that the painting has a structured logic that extends across its entire surface. 

It’s curious to notice that the work contains sections that can so easily be made distinct–the band of faces, the rich blue rectangle, the minor pattern of squares. What holds a painting together that seems to so easily divide along lines of separation? Is the look of movement, of an imaginary boat having traveled over imaginary water enough to gather together separate spaces? To try out the question as a statement: The bottom of the boat, this invisible space that is the underbelly of the imaginary, unites the visible structure of this painting by Isaac Kim without showing its hand.

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@masterp_ainter