2012년 4월 6일부터 5월 12일 까지 '갤러리포월스'의 개관 3주년 기념전으로 뉴욕작가 5명의 그룹전을 개최한다. 이번 『뉴욕 뉴워크 (New York New Work) 』展은 2008년 미국 예일대학교를 함께 졸업한 5명의 작가, 앤디 레인, 베쓰 리벤스퍼커, 리 밴더풀, 바스켄 막디키안, 제이슨 몬스의 작품을 한자리에 선보이는 기획전이다. 예외적으로, 졸업 후 뉴욕에서 작업을 하다 현재 레지던시 입주작가로 한국에 거주하고 있는 벨기에 출신 작가 막디키안은 서울에서 작업을 하였지만, 대부분의 전시 작품은 바로 2012년 최신작으로 뉴욕의 작가 스튜디오에서 창작된 것들이다. 갤러리 포월스에서 개인전을 개최한 바 있는 바스켄 막디키안이 4명의 미국 동료작가를 소개하면서 본 전시가 성사되었고, 이들 5명의 작가는 친구이자 동료이고 현대미술작가이지만 작업적인 측면에서는 각자의 예술적 지향점을 향하고 있다.

Andy Lane_Surf_캔버스에 유채_70×76.2cm_2010

앤디 레인(Andy Lane)의 회화는 평범한 일상의 상황을 관찰하면서 발견하게 되는 재난 위험과 그에 대한 취약성을 전달한다. 평범한 일상에서도 사고는 항상 일어날 준비가 되어있는 것이다. 2012년作 「터널 (Tunnel)」은 헬리콥터에서 내려다 보는 시점으로, 트레일러 트럭 두 대가 작가의 속도감 있는 붓놀림으로 속력을 내어 질주하는 듯하게 그려져 있다. 트럭 한 대는 터널의 안쪽으로, 다른 한 대는 바깥쪽으로 달린다. 마치 모든 것을 알고 있는 듯한 작가의 '전지적(全知的)' 존재는 좁다란 터널 안에서 무슨 일이 있을지 알지 못하는 나약한 운전사의 존재와 대조를 이룬다. 트럭은 화면의 밖으로 쏜살같이 달려나갈 듯하지만, 실상 이 모든 것은 흐릿하게 그려진 화면 안에 영원히 갇혀 있다.

Beth Livensperger-Statues_캔버스에 유채_45.7×45.7cm_2012

Beth Livensperger- Marble Leg_캔버스에 유채_35.5×45.7cm_2012

베쓰 리벤스퍼커(Beth Livensperger)는 뉴욕 메트로폴리탄 미술관에 전시되어 있는 미국 초창기 유물을 그림으로 그린다. 박물관학적인 전지적(全知的) 관점과 위에서 아래로 내려다보는 듯한 시점이 맞물려, 전시된 사물을 찬찬히 연구하는 듯한 느낌은 배가(倍加)된다. 2012년作 「대리석 다리 (Marble Leg)」에서 여성의 한쪽 엄지발가락은 화면의 가장자리를 닿고 있다. 순간, 페티시적인 인물조각과 화면으로서의 인물회화라는 이중구조가 맞물리면서 진지한 성애적(性愛的) 효과를 자아낸다. 대리석 발과 모더니즘적인 회화적 구조는 또한 미술기관의 답답함을 역으로 보여준다. 작가는 이를 '침묵'이라고 일컫는다.

Jason Mones_Cucoo's Nest_캔버스에 유채_40.6×30.5cm_2012

Jason Mones_Voices of Vision_캔버스에 유채_61×45.7cm_2012

제이슨 몬스(Jason Mones)은 정치와 유머의 경계를 아우르는 회화를 지향한다. 2012년作 「비전의 목소리 (Of Voices and Vision)」에는 '친절하게' 지폐 잎을 명시한, 돈 나무가 등장한다. 가느다란 줄기에서 돋아난 지폐는 얼굴과 모자를 지탱할 수 없을 정도이다. 여기서 얼굴은 어린 돈 나무에 걸쳐있는 가면에 불과하다. 정치 만화 같은 특징을 가진 이 작품에서 우리는 감상자로서 단지 측면을 통해서만 이러한 내막을 감지하면서 어떻게 시스템 전체가 움직이는지 엿볼 수 있을 뿐이다. 제이슨 몬스는 가면을 쓰고 있는 정치적 책략의 기제를 폭로하면서, 보여지는 외면과 자본의 실상을 시각화하는 데 관심을 가진다.

Lee Vanderpoo_Color sachet_캔버스에 아크릴채색_100×80cm_2012

Lee Vanderpoo_iou_캔버스에 아크릴채색_67×51cm_2012

리 밴더풀(Lee Vanderpool)의 색면추상적 아크릴 회화는 일견 플라스틱으로 만들어진 오늘날의 따분한 풍경을 보여주는 듯하다. 작가는 이를 인체와 연관 짓는다. 하지만, 간결하고 함축된 화면의 요소들은 역동감을 주는 특정한 지점에 정확히 위치하면서, 인체나 어떤 사물을 직접적으로 묘사하고 있지는 않다. 2012년作 「색봉지 (Color Sachet)」는 중심부와 대각선으로 우측하단 모서리에 투명한 보라색과 적색 계열의 색 균형을 이루는 화면 안에서 다양한 컬러블록이 역동적으로 움직이는 형상을 담고 있다. 여기서 두 무리의 자유로운 선은 적색, 파랑, 맛깔스러운 노랑, 핫핑크, 라벤더 등의 컬러블록을 가로지르며 미묘한 상호작용을 하고 있다. 감상자가 작품의 의미를 해석하려 할지라도, 결국 보이는 것은 추상의 화면을 통해 자신이 보고자 하는 그 기대 심리만이 남을 뿐이다.

Vasken Mardikian_Untitled_비닐 캔버스에 아크릴채색_85×65cm_2012

전시작품 중 가장 구상성을 배제하는 바스켄 막디키안 (Vasken Mardikian)의 추상회화는 질감을 표현하는 얇은 표면이 전부인 듯하다. 흰색 비닐 캔버스에 제작한 작품으로 물리적으로는 평평하고 부드럽게 처리되어 있으면서 이미지적으로는 거친 땅의 질감을 보여준다. 입자 덩어리와 같은 시각 요소는 카멜레온처럼 변화적이며 또한 항상 독특한 효과를 내는데, 이는 바다, 달빛 풍경 또는 텔레비전의 정지화면과 닮아 있다. 막디키안의 회화적 기법은 베쓰 리벤스퍼커가 사용하는 '빛반사 효과'나 앤디 레인의 선택적인 '흐리기 기법'과 효과 면에서 상통한다. 하지만, 바스켄 막디키안의 회화는 사람이 손으로 그린 그림이라는 흔적을 제거하면서, 외계(外界)의 개입 없이 스스로를 제어하는 컴퓨터의 폐회로적인 접근방식을 채택한다. ● 미국이 가진 시각 디자인의 영향력과 금융자본의 힘으로, 뉴욕은 20세기 중반 이후로 세계 미술계를 주도해왔다. 뉴욕에서- 또한 정치적, 예술적 시스템이 존재하는 샌프란시스코, 뉴욕, 서울 등 세계 곳곳에서- 예술가로서 작품 활동을 한다는 것의 중요한 임무는 세상의 잘못을 찾고 그 위협을 지적한다는 관점에서 작품에 임하는 일일 것이다. ■ 알렉시스 크놀턴

Vasken Mardikian_Untitled_비닐 캔버스에 아크릴채색_85×65cm_2012

My bed is shaking at 5:30 a.m., and I think this natural disaster is my cellphone alarm. In my dreams, I am on a dingy in a lake and someone has unexpectedly jumped in with me. I feel the rocking from side to side and the ripples in the water. By the time my eyes are open, the motion has halted and my brain connects the effect to the cause. ● I am visiting San Francisco from my home in Berlin, and I meet my uncle in the foggy morning on his pale blue wooden porch. Even in the night it smells like flowers here. My uncle stands still behind the door. He lets out a laugh both nervous and relieved, and is anxious to check the house's gas line. ● This small earthquake is an event which - like any - generates its own set of effects, results both completely unrelated to an earthquake and yet connected to it by proximity or temporality. This text is one, the memory of an early morning meeting on the porch is another. The five contemporary painters I will discuss here all graduated from the Yale School of Art (New Haven) in 2008, and the work in this catalog was primarily generated out of their New York studios in the past year. The exception is Vasken Mardikian, who is a Belgian currently living in Seoul, who lived in New York following graduate school and who has introduced these American painters to Gallery4walls. ● In introducing New York New Work I have already mentioned five cities vastly distant from one another, a small earthquake in one of them. Because of these distances, I hesitate to tell a story of common meaning without again reiterating the radical contingency of meaning and context across these very different and simultaneous frontiers. Despite the fact that these artists are a group of friends and colleagues, all working in the field of contemporary painting, each employs a separate mode of working and style. ● Not all of the paintings in this catalog are funny, but I suggest that some of them might be. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but something else. The massive continental plate of serious painterly investment, so heavy and ancient, drifts into grinding contact with another landmass, the banal, light and absurd. After witnessing this heat-expending, disruptive rubbing together, one wants to laugh nervously out of relief - and go check for a gas leak. ●In lieu of stretching my expedient earthquake metaphor, I would like to point to the hazard and vulnerability Andy Lane's paintings unpack as he investigates "the human visual condition." Lane's works picture banal situations that, from a particular perspective, are accidents waiting to happen. Bridge is painted from the height of a seagull and features two cars that buzz at the speed of Lane's brush. Leafy trees in flaming green flank the bridge at the lower-right corner and indicate that the two cars are at this moment leaving land for their journey over open water. ● The painting employs dramatic irony: the seagull, or the viewer who is watching the cars, has a more complete knowledge of the situation taking place than the drivers of the cars do. They are about to plunge, not off the bridge, but off the edge of the canvas. ● Dramatic irony is both funny and sad because the character on stage is doing something against his own interest, out of an ignorance that only the audience understands and watches unravel. Lane's use of this device points to the politics of spectatorship, forcing the viewer to be aware of the privilege of this perspective and how it literally "drives" the narrative. The artist's omniscient presence is also contrasted to the puny drivers in their hermetic pods. Though they seem about to zip off the edge of the canvas, they are stuck for eternity in the flicks of Lane's subtle impasto. ● Beth Livensperger's sense of hazard is present in the title, Furniture on a High Shelf. Livensperger's painting is of early American furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is developed out of a series of paintings of this and other museum collections. Strangely, the viewer is positioned exactly at the horizon line of the shelf, so that an uncomfortable geometry almost severs the picture plane into an upper and lower half. The expensive wood and pink plush curves of the central chair on the upper level is presented for a viewer's pleasure, only to be interrupted by the aggressive white glare of display lighting, reflected in the glass case. ● Livensperger's skeptical painterly gaze floats on top of the supposedly omniscient gaze of the museological, thus doubly scrutinizing the chairs as objects of observation. In her work Marble Leg, a smooth foot on a thick marble pedestal peeks out of its drapery. The sleek marble slab emphasizes the drama of the foot, along with the frozen procession of cloth folds which fall from an unseen leg. The smallest toe of the marble foot perfectly touches the edge of the canvas frame. In this moment, two extremes, figurative sculpture as a fetish, and figurative painting as a frame, are pinned together with dead-pan erotic efficiency. Both the marble foot and the modern canvas frame exude a feeling of institutional suffocation; Livensperger describes this as "silence." ● Lee Vanderpool sites these acrylic color zones smack within our homogeneous contemporary landscape of plastic. For him, the marks relate to the body. As I look at his concise shorthand, I get the feeling that Vanderpool intentionally strips and strands the marks, abandoning them exactly at the moment when they are specific and energetic, but can't yet be responsible for representing a real body or a part. As the viewer desires to read into the work, he is left with only his own expectations of what could be there. In Vanderpool's 9P, I find myself wanting to call the blue line drawing at the center of the canvas a pair of testicles. This makes me feel prone to risk: not because testicles represent masculinity and sexuality, but because I don't know whose psychological landscape I am supposed to plunder. Did the artist really intend testicles here, or am I just making it up? ● In my opinion, Vanderpool's ffpp is a brutal sacrifice of signification. It consists of smears of paint topping a Joseph Albers style ziggurat of alternating purple and pink steps. In the middle, clear and brown acrylic is smeared on top of red, resting on a green ellipse. Because it is so foregrounded, framed, and central, the clear paint seems excessive - it lacks color and is useless for depicting anything except its own base material qualities. It appears to be a bodily index, like a fluid, or a painterly scrap, rather than representing something else. From bottom to top the painting can be read as a transition from form to formlessness. ● Most radically avoiding representation, Vasken Mardikian's paintings consist of nothing except a thin veneer of pictured texture. The artist makes his works on white vinyl so that the image is physically very flat and smooth, while depicting a rough visual terrain. The optical graininess is chameleon-like and always unique: it sometimes resembles an ocean, sometimes a moonscape, at other times, the static of a television set or a wrinkled piece of paper. Mardikian's paintings do contain painterly effects similar to Livensperger's dots of reflected light or Lane's selective blurs. But in Mardikian's paintings, the trace of the artist's hand is not to be seen. The work looks a bit as if a machine makes it. However, we are reminded by the work's exquisite qualities that only a human eye is actually able to perceive it. The automatic nature of Mardikian's paintings questions norms of artistic production. One imagines the artist with a tub of industrial paint, a roll of plastic, some chemicals and a squeegee. What satisfies about such a process? Who should be satisfied by such a process - the viewer or the artist? ● Artistic satisfaction is a serious joke for Mardikian. The paintings are results of the conditions of their making and insist on a closed loop that refuses to include outside objects. I start to see flecks of visual debris that float above the shallow surface, as well as scratches. It is unclear where these marks come from, but they make perfect sense in this visual world. Like listening to noise, patterns and orientations inevitably emerge and Mardikian gives his paintings formats and colors although he refrains from titles. ● On another note, the artist Jason Mones does not refrain from putting hats in his paintings. I remember the artist's former obsessions with cowboy hats and military hats, and now he is painting top hats. In the symbolic still life Voices of Vision, there are no people, but actually two hats: one on top and one upside-down that looks like a flower pot, with a base of warm terracotta. ● We see a money tree: tender-ly painted mint foliage. The bills sprout in a bunch from a thin stalk that like a neck just barely supports a face and hat. With the diagrammatic clarity of a political cartoon, we as viewers are able to see this bust from the side. We get to see how the whole system works. To some poor sucker looking at the bust frontally (which is also where the light in the painting comes from), the expressive face of the mask and top hat would both hide and distract from the flapping bills underneath. Like Lane's cars with their naive drivers, we imagine the fool who is being tricked and are thankful it is not us. The poor sucker thinks he is looking into the eyes of an important man, but he is really just looking into a mask. ● A clever part to whole relationship occurs between the blurry ovals of the presidential portraits on the dollar bills that make up the brain of the mask, and the imagined bust as seen by the poor sucker. The artist has focused on the painterly qualities of the dollar bills rather than rendering the individual presidents on the currency. By painting the hidden money in a physical and material manner, Mones not only casts his vote for the colore camp of the old art historical argument, but he exposes the tools of political artifice that make such a mask or engrave such a portrait on to currency: design and capital. ● Since the mid 20th century, New York has dominated the art world, largely due to America's influence on popular design and the presence of financial capital. It is not an overstatement to say that the celebrity artist's face, today more than ever, is equivalent to the presidential portrait: etched and integrated into the currency of art. Given the ubiquity and magnitude of the all-encompassing political and artistic system that Mones' painting seems to critique, it is perhaps a laudable task for the artists making new work in "New York" (from San Francisco to New York to Seoul) to paint pictures in such a light that one finds the deeper faults and exposes global threats. ■ Alexis Knowlton

Vol.20120407f | 뉴욕 뉴워크 New York New Work展