The Korean painter Chang Rim Ji exhibits his latest works at the gallery tRes, in Nantes, France. The exhibition shows paintings with yellow dominant, infinite variations on a floral theme taken from one painting to another, always the same, always different.
It is less a surface that imposes itself on us from the outset than a window, open to the outside, on a field of flowers agitated by the wind, captured in their movement by the precise and nervous line the artist.
Let us approach the canvas a little closer : it is not a white background, no, but several backgrounds that overlap, erase each other while revealing the previous layer.
The surface is not there to be seen : it is there to hide, veil, make disappear. And in a double movement to reveal and let appear.
What is this secret, which we see with great effort under the field of blooming flowers ? A fine black outline, interrupted, a mouth, a hand, the curve of a back. the sketch slips away, the initial sketch is lacking.
Chang Rim Ji gives us the key. He hands us his sketchbook : bodies of women, sketched in charcoal, alone or in groups. They are there, on the canvas, at the origin of everything. Then fade.
Let us not be so insensitive as to seek further. Psychology is impoverishment.
When his father died, Chang Rim began painting yellow pumpkin flowers. Her mother planted a whole field in memory of her late husband. They are here today, before our eyes, engaged in our meditation on the permanence and vanity of everything.