GJ KIMSUNKEN

Figuration 20.6, 2020

oil on canvas

36 x 24 inches

price on request

INQUIRE

GJ Kimsunken, with authenticity of gesture, addresses questions about the existence of us :: who we are, why we are, what we are for. In the artist's singular, elegant erasures is the incomprehensible - an attempt to distill and universalize individual experience. 

In the works' verticality is the human figure, and in its solidity, a physical presence. One can feel the artist standing and questioning in front of the work, scraping away layers of paint in an act that is at once creation and division. While overwhelming minimalist, here is also an affinity with action painting, in that the works aspire to an experience of immediacy and presence. And in these works, one gets a sense of his own presence, while simultaneously being offered a place of meditation. 

The illusion of minimalist simplicity gives way to explorable surfaces in the delicate ridges that form by the scraping away of paint, giving a sense of sculptural physicality in space. These variable, wavering edges also give the painter's gestures an individual and human character, set against and in contrast to fields of continual color. These monochrome expanses, however, are not void or emptiness in the way that Barnett Newman wrote in The Plastic Image :: " . . . the artist tries to wrest truth from the void." Here rather the fields, in an earthbound palette, have a pervasive fullness, and beauty.