Carvalho Park announces the opening of Telephone to the Divine, an exhibition in which works by Se Yoon Park, GJ Kimsunken and Joseph Hart are prompted and dictated by an eternal impulse to trace experience. A sense of the self and responsiveness pervade the work – be it a gesture revealing the angle or perspective by which the artist faced his work, the pressure applied equating the gravity of the artist’s questions, a contour – open or closed – realized by the day’s resounding mood. It is an abiding inclination that ties directness with truthfulness, in the process of making or in harnessing the purest of mediums :: light and shadow. Telephone to the Divine opens the evening of June 13 and will be on view through July 28.

SE YOON PARK

It is put forth here that the inherent beauty of the inanimate object is interlocked with light. With the exquisite formal clarity that comes from the mind of the architect, the three-dimensional symmetries in Park’s objects manifest, spiral and dispel, to affect contrasts of light and shadow on the works’ surfaces. As static objects are activated by these contrasts, the meaning of Park’s symmetries becomes lucid :: In the series Light Grows Darkness Grows the base stands in flat symmetry. The middle symmetries – twisting angles and planes – maximize contrasts, while the top’s continuing contours heighten light by allowing seventy percent of the sculpture’s surface to be illuminated. One knows symmetry as fifty // fifty; yet Park’s symmetries never give equally to light and shadow. Acknowledging darkness’s presence as cyclical and ever crucial, Park’s contours, in this elemental duality, aspire to light.

These are fundamentally and persistently personal structures. In balance with the work’s adherence to precision of form, autobiography pervades Park’s work. In this exhibition, Park imparts the deeply personal nature of his objects in a towering installation – artist-built shelves extending twenty-four feet across the gallery – containing tiered rows of sculptures – an affecting catalogue of works that, when taken in from left to right, reads as diary. The rawness of a surface is analogous to turbulence, while color relates to mood or sensation. Titles such as Vulnerable, Void or Crossroads underscore the visual metaphors of the artist’s temperaments, toils, self actualizations – recorded states of emotion and perspective, executed over a four-year period. This is the first time, together or separate, these works are being presented.

GJ KIMSUNKEN

Kimsunken, with authenticity of gesture, and by the presence and absence of the materiality of paint, 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 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 velvety paint, disclosing a richness of intention and emitting 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, in a palette that extends from earthbound to diaphanous, the fields have a pervasive fullness, and beauty. 

JOSEPH HART 

In Hart’s work are links between gesture, space and time. Fluctuating rhythms, contradictory, esoteric, but collectively harmonized, speak to the body’s input. Hart’s gesture is less determined by the format of the support than the artist’s physical correspondence to the sheet. A line discloses whether it came from wrist, elbow or shoulder, whether the artist stood over or faced the work, marking the drawing’s ascension from floor to wall. In Figure I, an elongated, vertical composition of lines suggesting bones and joints, not only visually indicates the figurative but also the tall stature of the artist – his more unrestricted range of movement and extended reach, when face-to-face with the work.

Ghostly areas of white acrylic, atop and obscuring earlier graphite lines, is where the automatic becomes considered. Here the swiftness and persistence of Hart’s gestural marks, perhaps the artist’s fundamental rhythm, go from pleasing spontaneity to a similarly compelling building of the picture. Collaged papers – some from previous drawings, some found, others tethered to personal histories – are brought into the work. In tandem, these elements, with ghosted marks and textures from studio surfaces, record the artist’s search for elusive compositional order with a marked authenticity to both material and process.