Art Critic and Professor Mario Naves
Every color has its potentialities and drawbacks. Travel around the world and a specific hue will accrue a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory associations. It's a wonder, in fact, that an artist can endow a specific hue with anything resembling full intentionality. Red, for instance, varies wildly in its symbolic associations depending on where on the globe you're setting foot. Likewise, purple is a tone that can encompass a variety of heady connotations. And so it goes for any color that can be located on the painter's color wheel.
Then again, black isn't on the color wheel, nor is its opposite, white. Given that neither registers on the visible spectrum of light, black and white aren't colors at all--or so those who make physics their stock-in-trade insist. Painters know better: black and white are there, stubbornly ensconced on the palette as agents for shifting value, yoking space and garnering attention. Which isn't to say that artists are in agreement on their aesthetic efficacy, particularly when it comes to black. Leonardo da Vinci didn't much care for it. Auguste Renoir, on the other hand, dubbed black the queen of all colors. And Henri Matisse? He likened its "force" to music.
Black has long been a constant--indeed, an inescapable presence--in the paintings of Jungwon Phee. Other colors filter through his art: slurs of rich rusty brown appear in the canvases, often as a coefficient to the blocks of iridescent gold that punctuate them. But black is predominant, and not a hue Phee takes lightly.
In a series of studies done on canvas, collectively titled "Archival Painting," he created a daunting inventory of surfaces and variations of color, experimenting, all the while, with texture and viscosity. Phee's sketchbooks--labyrinthian accumulations of notes, marks, stains and other ephemera--offer additional testimony to the seriousness with which he regards his materials and, yes, the color black.
Not surprisingly, then, Phee has subtitled his recent body of work "The Black Path," a grouping of canvases that numbers, at the most recent counting, over one-hundred. What impels an artist to explore a single artistic element with such tenacity?
Native traditions leave their mark. Having been born and raised in Seoul, Phee can't help but have jipilmuk as part of his cultural DNA. Jipilmuk is a distinctly Korean construct, being an amalgamation of the words for paper (ji), brush (pil) and ink (muk). Phee is wise to the symbolism black holds in Korean culture--chief among them, mortality and dignity, as well as authority and its dominion--and combines them with concerns that are more hands-on in nature. It's not too much of a leap, I think, to connect muk with the time Phee spent in New York City: the gritty environs of Brooklyn, say, where he pursued his studies in art at Pratt Institute. That, and it's where he discovered black gesso.
How do we read a painting like, to take a piece at random, Untitled; The Black Path CXVII (2022) The canvas is modest in scale--it measures 90.9 by 72.7 centimeters--but its format corresponds, roughly, to the human form. This presentational aspect is reiterated by the picture's "portrait" orientation, a decision that is, to one degree or another, inherently confrontational. The composition is bisected horizontally just a smidgen above the halfway mark. The upper portion of the canvas is a matte field of black, a surface both velvety and permeable. The bottom contains an aggressive cascade of white, gray and black, a run of washy acrylic that takes on a metallic cast.
The image is tersely contrived, a take-it-or-leave it juxtaposition of material and approach. Which begs the question: though we know how the picture has been made, what, exactly, is the nature of the image?
Phee has long acknowledged a debt to Abstract Expressionism. (The hieratic approach to composition and color bears some resemblance to the art of Mark Rothko.) The stark, no-nonsense physicality of the work points, also, to the influence of Minimalism. Phee follows up on the psychological interiority typical of the former and the brute concreteness of the latter, but invests them with currents that are both embodied within the canvas and range afield from its parameters. Notwithstanding the daunting strictures he's set for himself, Phee taps into the far-ranging power of metaphor.
Phee's textures are, I think, a case study in how ineradicable the touch and place can be to an artist's vision. Whether they are distressed, burnished, cracked or scabbed, Phee's surfaces achieve a tangibility that evokes the bodily as well as the natural world. Skin is an analogue for the pictures--a fragile one, to be sure--as is the unfeeling gravity of stone. Phee's layering of materials, by turns, is additive and destructive, simultaneously an avowal of purpose and a questioning of it. You don't need to know that Phee came of age in the city to intuit the urban character of his hardscrabble paintings: it's there to glean from the work itself.
Phee's use of black--somewhat monomaniacal, invariably elegant--hints at a pursuit that is rather dour in its philosophical implications. His writing on the work is rife with existential tangents, stern reveries, and a dogged insistence that painting "can act as the catalyst [to] promote the subjective consciousness of all individuals." What this portends is that the pictures, notwithstanding their intense physicality, provide a conduit--a kind of mirror, really--within which the viewer is able to confront his or her own questions about the nature and worth of experience. Though freighted with responsibility, the path Phee offers is also marked by generosity. Not every artist treats his audience with respect. Phee is one of them and his paintings evince of rare and welcome integrity.
October 27, 2022
