Wihro Kim American, b. 1991

“This current body of work deals with a somewhat paradoxical notion of big, intimate space. Big, intimate space touches on an imagined sense of grandiosity evoked from unlikely places- small places, flat places, places that might be confused for objects or air, or places that are literally a few inches from your nose. Some of these “places” include sheets of paper, trees, other natural scenes, screens, and domestic settings like walls or corners. This big, intimate space feels large, almost infinite, but is revealed in small, finite moments. The paintings in this show do not attempt to depict this space (a futile endeavor), but aim to provoke the desire and curiosity necessary to glimpse this realm that exists between perception and imagination.

The paintings in this show spring forth from moments when I had experienced this private expanse, and attempt to provide a pathway to that vista. Drawing from real moments, the paintings take that setting and build up in successive layers until a sensation of that large other space is felt. This is done primarily by overlapping different pictorial and conceptual orders to create an expansive sense of depth that feels simultaneously known and ambiguous, permeable in one sense and obtuse in another. Other formal polarities are utilized against one another to aid in the navigation towards that airy but stable sensation, balancing on poles such as hard and soft, abstract and figurative, loose and tight, vague and explicit.

Through a mostly careful process of layering, the final image is constructed from an amalgamation of several different time periods of when the painting was being worked. Some marks from the very beginning of the painting are preserved, either by masking them off or through a more intuitive avoidance. Something that appears to be the background may have been the last thing to be painted, and vice versa. This somewhat contrived way of layering is done with the aim to further the effect of that paradoxical, expansive simultaneity of air and solidity. “