Four canvases lie on the floor. Though painted and thus recognisable as paintings, one must first lift them by hand in order to fully appreciate them. Each loose piece of canvas must be picked up, moved, and placed anew. Quite naturally, they are to be folded, crumpled, rolled, and at times even rubbed or scratched. And that is perfectly acceptable—for painting, after all, is also an object. A painting is a thing, a material, a physical presence. Four Sheets is an exhibition of four such sheets of canvas, or four paintings, that begins with this very recognition.
Accordingly, in Painting’s Nipples, there are indeed nipples. Like any object—any thing—it is also a body. And so, just as in Painting’s Panty, it must wear underwear. The body of a painting, as imagined by Dasom PARK, is composed of bone and flesh, no different from our own. The support—the skeleton—already determines its form, and the image—the flesh—merely follows. These four paintings demonstrate as much: the brush traces the folds in the canvas hung on the wall; the image is cut along the brushstrokes; and the resulting gestures and forms give rise to the painting itself. Almost Squid—a work born with guts and (green) blood flowing through bone and flesh—stands as testament. It is material, and beyond that, corporeal—and beyond the corporeal, temporal.
In PARK’s practice, painting is no longer a static object fixed to the wall. It is encountered as a pliable body—tactile, flexible, and mutable. And, as with all living things, to touch and to observe her paintings is to confront their finitude. In tracing their imagined birth, transformation, and eventual dissolution, we may, in the end, stumble upon something cosmic.