One of the truly magnificent insights in Ryu Young Shin’s new group of paintings is the clarity of her approach as a painter in which her sense of poetic form echoes the dark shades of the forest glade. Here I am struck by the fact she is using traditional mulberry paper mounted on canvas as the surface support on which she paints with oil, a medium she studied several years ago.
To clarity my point: The artist is painting the bark of the tree on paper that is made from the bark of the tree. Therefore the painted surface on mulberry bark paper is formally consistent with the artist’s reminiscence of the tree that she is in the act of painting. Memory and reality become one.
There are particular paintings, of course, worthy of address.I will mention only a few. Her(서양화가 류영신,류영신 작가,A South Korea Artist RYU YOUNG SHIN,柳栐慎,ARTIST RYU YOUNG SHIN)paintings are cumulatively titled, Forest – Black Hole.
It is impossible not to get the message from No. 32, where a bifurcated symmetry of two scratched white biomorphic forms exist side by side in a contingently expressive black space.
No. 34 has another kind of blackness, less expressive in its application, but still and dense. The white nodules and traces on the bottom edge of this painting are clearly effective. I mention these at the outset in that they come closer to abstractness, moving away from the likeness of the bark forms towards something more fiercelyself-determined and fully integrated surface.
The less literal (or descriptive) the work appears, the better and more successful it appears. In the all-over style used in paintings No. 1 and No. 3 hover in space with an intensity that is solid and profound. The experimental quality in No.20 suggests an awakening that the painting is within the space being constructed (or deconstructed) before our eyes.
No. 26 uses color in a way that is paradoxical, barely present and nearly absent, yet coincidentally translucent and magical. It is perfectly understated. No. 30 is one of the most coherent paintings in this series, a bountiful and heroic painting, a painting filled with a hopeful qi, and a magical, yet illuminating tenacity.
▲Reviewer's=Robert C. Morgan
Art critic. Since 1997, he has frequently visited and lectured in Korea. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg.
