Kamel Mennour, Paris
Open November 6, 2013 through January 25, 2014
Lee’s first show at the gallery occupies both of its spaces. The Rue-Saint-André-des-Arts location shows seven canvases from the “Dialogues” series, 2008–13. Though large in scale, the majority of the canvases are left blank. Each features an iteration of the slightly contoured square that has appeared in Lee’s work since his “Correspondence” paintings, begun in 1991. Most of these shapes are gray fading to white in subtle strokes, in some cases to the point of invisibility. Lee mixes oil with natural mineral pigments, intensifying the elements’ color and expanding their range: far from uniform, the grays contain a subtle richness of blues, greens, and yellows. In the most densely worked passages at the widest edges of the shapes, the paint forms a thick crust where the layers of mineral shimmer: a continental shelf in miniature.
The monumental simplicity of these works reflects Lee’s sensitive reticence and his concept of the “art of encounter.” This encounter plays out in the negotiation between formal control and the unpredictable nature of the minerals, and is dramatized by the artist’s emphasis on gesture and its self-extinction.
For the more ambitious installation at the Rue du Pont de Lodi, La peinture ensevelie, 2013, the artist covers two canvases on the floor with squares of irregularly raked sand, so that only the painted shapes are seen. The works sit on a surface of pale gravel interrupted by three large granite rocks. Evoking the Zen garden, the work approaches pseudo-spiritual kitsch more than the artist’s earlier large-scale sculptural assemblages. Lee has previously discussed the shameful connotation attached to the artist’s vocation from his Korean education, a position that “burying” painting under sand comes perilously close to replicating. Taken together, the “Dialogues,” despite their beauty, begin to look like paintings that would rather be craft, discipline, philosophy, religion—anything but art itself. —Matthew McLean
