Daydreams of Infinity By Elena Fadeeva,Triumph Gallery, 2018
Artist’s statement
I normally paint the image coming from the moment when I just wake up or just before go to bed. After I paint it then I try to guess where this image and figures come from. But I cannot remember anyone and any happening. Only the feel of space, the background (like some part shape of object, humidity, brightness, texture of road etc.) exists in my memory.
My leaf shaped small image might be my every moment breath. This image makes a form and structure which might exist around me and the main actor of the space is the animism of synesthetic imagery.
This image makes me feel that I am in the right place at right time. However, every figure of my paintings is imaginative ambiguous nonexistence. I can just remember the moment which I am painting: the moment is the breath of keeping the tension between chest and stomach. I can feel that the moment I am painting is the meditative process but rather it is more like a chanting because my image has got the structure and rhythm which comes from structural sensibility around me.
Daydreams of Infinity
By Elena Fadeeva
I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality!
Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz. L'Amoureuse Initiation
Gaston Bachellard in his Poetics of Space (1957) reflects upon immensity; vast, infinite spaces which he claims to be an inexhaustible poetic source. Immensity for him is, in the first place, a universe of daydreaming. Memories and fantasies there are intertwined and form a very special inner space, in which the real, ‘immediate’ world loses its system of coordinates and its sense of time and becomes truly infinite. He calls immensity the ‘movement of a motionless man’, as by a serene and soothing process of daydreaming a man can operate and perceive immensity within himself and around him.
Poets and their works are the main tool for Bachellard to understand space in which we all exist; and the product of his theory in itself is the most poetic and humane viewpoint on architecture and representation of the surrounding world.
The notion of immensity, in Bachellard’s serene viewpoint is the closest illustration of the works of Yun Kyung Jeong, which she represents in her show in Triumph Gallery. Her versatile paintings are loving dialogues between a visitor, who becomes a motionless daydreamer and the infinite solitude inside him.
Some structures and details of her work are reminiscent of architectural graphics, axonometric representations of real objects. However, they seem to be weightlessly floating in an infinite cosmos of abstract lines and repetitive patterns. The striking thing about Yun Kyung’s ensembles is their scale, which cannot be measured and thus understood; one memorises and recognises shapes on the canvas but cannot locate himself in that space. It evokes subconsciously a very intimate juxtaposition between small and large, finite and infinite, humane and divine.
For Yung Kyung the forms she captures, do not derive directly from her surrounding reality, in the same time they are not a pure purely abstraction either. They germinate in her mind rather as memories, as a recombination of her daily experiences. The way she creates her works is reminiscent of the techniques of meditation: the ‘instant’ outside world stops existing for her when she focuses on her own breath and thoughts, dissolving the border between memory and imagination.
Yun Kyung’s calm spaces are infinite and solitary, but they are not silent. The clear structure of repetitive elements creates a musical, rhythmic quality. Dynamic brushstrokes versus delicate but regular elements creates tangible almost audible vibrations, just like the tranquil sound of the human voice in the crystal silence of infinite space.