Art critic Andy St. Louis
If painting is a form of storytelling, Simon Ko is a master of the vignette. In his figurative painting practice, he introduces unrealized narratives that propose sketched scenarios rather than fully fleshed-out fictions. The expressive range that he integrates into his ambiguous tableaus induces dreamlike reveries that remain categorically inconclusive, omitting all but the absolutely necessary visual information that would otherwise offer insight into the plotlines of his protagonists’ stories. There is no exposition, conflict, climax or dénouement here, only a series of isolated moments, frozen in time, perpetually held in a state of indeterminacy.
In lieu of diegesis, Ko fills his paintings with visual motifs and compositional clues that generate a potency of affect. Sometimes these scenes speak directly to emotional experience, while in other cases, the mere suggestion of a silhouette or trace of a gesture is sufficient to stir up Rorschachesque associations. Ko’s works are suffused with a dreamlike sensibility, much like finding oneself in a surreal yet convincing situation within a dream and lacking any causal awareness of what came before or what might come next. He taps into the liminal state of consciousness that occurs whenever we press the snooze button and briefly drift back to sleep, when the images conjured by our imaginations are their most vivid and the feelings they evoke the most visceral. In such instances, we luxuriate in a drowsy suspension of disbelief as if entering into the scene of a film in which we are both actor and auteur.
Ko expands the theatricality of his figurative oeuvre in “Some Gorgeous Dream,” inviting the viewer to forestall the dominance of the ego and permit the id to partake in an aesthetic escape. Fall In (2022) willfully destabilizes the visual veracity of its representative ambit, depicting a pair of figures in profile against a background of stylized clouds amid a horizonless expanse of indigo. Crucially, Ko fractures the illusion of this fanciful environment by allowing viewers to see the metal scaffold from which this skyscape is hung, as well as a generic brick wall that peeks through from behind. Both the illustrated scrim and brick patterning in the background appear as flat layered planes, an effect that is enhanced by four vertical strings of irregularly-shaped stars that hang in the space between the protagonists and their surroundings, casting shallow shadows onto the cloud-filled backdrop as if dangling from the ceiling overhead. Finally, a set of cloudlike forms that emerge from the bottom of the canvas complete the illusion by occluding the lower body of each figure, onto which similar shadows can be seen.
The figures themselves evince a flatness consistent with the painting’s planar visual logic, painted such that any perceived depth is mitigated, so that they appear more like paper dolls than embodied physical entities. This perception is compounded by the uniformity of their shadows, which fall with equal weight as those of the paper-thin stars that punctuate the picture plane. The similarity of these umbrae imply the presence of an external light source in the painting—it’s as if the whole scene is illuminated by a spotlight, flattening its layers and enabling viewers to infer the intervening space between visual elements. Given the meager slivers of black paint that define these shadows, Fall In assumes a puppet-show aesthetic of falsified depth wherein the foreground, background and figures alike bespeak a paper-thin frontality that accentuates the painting’s surreal setting.
Ko’s use of shadows throughout this body of work offers insight into his painterly turn toward ever-more phantasmagorical expressions of emotional introspection. Although his oeuvre is still largely dominated by a flattened-out aesthetic, his recent works increasingly integrate elements of depth, even if barely noticeable. Hold Steady (2022)—which depicts two figures in profile against a neutral white background, positioned below a hanging mobile of colorful abstract shapes above their heads—seems at first to be completely two-dimensional, lacking any depth of field whatsoever. It is only upon closer inspection that a single shadow can be detected where one piece of the mobile overlaps with another—an easy-to-miss detail which, once discovered, becomes impossible to ignore. In Cold Whisper (2022) and Languages (2022), each a closeup rendering of two overlapped faces, Ko’s subjects again appear completely flat, casting sharp shadows of uniform size against their respective backgrounds, further stripping them of three-dimensionality. If they were fully fleshed-out figures occupying a realistic space, their shadows would vary in size based on their distance from the background, but since this is not the case, the protagonists manifest a planar presence that makes them appear as if carved from cardboard.
Whenever a pair of figures appears in Ko’s paintings, their shadows invariably fall onto their surroundings, but not onto each other’s bodies—they exist in parallel dimensions, occupying the same space but physically isolated from each other. Are these paintings of single figures, alongside their imagined partners? Or are they real people, each in their own dream? Just like the subjects conjured up by our own subconscious while we sleep, there is an intrinsic fragility to their appearance that gives the impression of a vision on the brink of being swept away. Ko’s figures are always close but never touching, which generates a sense of longing that is never permitted to transcend pure desire and always stops short of actual physical connection. No matter how much we may try to embrace our loved one in dreams, we always awake unfulfilled, missing the warmth of their touch and weight of their body in our arms.
The exception to this tendency is Floaters (2022), which demonstrates a notable departure from the visual syntax that governs the other works in “Some Gorgeous Dream.” Here, Ko’s protagonists appear occupy a vast three-dimensional space, standing knee-deep in luminescent water covered with a patchwork of floating flowers painted in pastel hues. Although they are recognizable in relation to other paintings in this body of work, they are not illuminated by the harsh, flattening light that distinguishes Ko’s figurative aesthetic; their bodies are partially shaded, lending an effect of volume and substance to their presence that registers as more authentic than usual. Most importantly, however, they are depicted holding hands—they succeed where others have failed by establishing tactile connection that is absent in his other works. It is a dream shared by two lovers, a mutual expression of yearning, a fifty-fifty fantasy.
By all rights, Floaters aptly fits the description of “some gorgeous dream.” But what makes this dream more “real” than those envisioned in Ko’s other paintings, and why do its protagonists succeed in linking their bodies together, where other dreams fall short? The answer is in their eyes. While Ko’s proclivity to omit detail in his subjects’ faces often makes it difficult to read the direction of their gaze, the figures in Floaters both clearly cast their eyes downward to examine the surface of the water in which they stand, transfixed by the surreal sight of the glowing flower petals that ebb and flow with the current. In short, both figures are focused on the same sight, manifesting a linkage of mind and spirit. In other paintings, Ko’s protagonists glance in different directions as indicated by the angle and orientation of their faces. In Hold Steady, the female figure casts her gaze upward to observe the Calderesque mobile hanging overhead while the male looks straight ahead; the same holds true for the subjects of Fall In, with the female looking toward the ceiling while the male fixes his gaze on her falling body as he opens his arms to catch her. In Think Fast (2022), both figures lock eyes on their own sets of balls that they juggle, and even in The Longshot (2022), where both figures face the same direction, both appear to be looking at their own outstretched hands as they fly through a double-rainbow sky.
In “Some Gorgeous Dream,” Ko invites the dreamer in all of us to indulge our fantasies and liberate the latent chimeras that are overwhelmingly repressed by our consciousness. Such visions propel his practice beyond the realm of representation as he probes the recesses of his psyche with a conviction that can be keenly felt throughout his oeuvre. Ultimately, the sense of connection sought by the figures that populate his paintings is consummated upon encountering his paintings, linking the viewer’s gaze with that of the artist and sharing in powerful moments of emotional resonance.
September 22, 2022
