Blank Spaces
"When the face expresses an affect, it becomes a
surface or a plane that coincides with the affect itself. It loses its
autonomous existence to become a "pure" affect"(Malabou, S E L,
2013, p.46).
I am looking for Kim Kim Kim's studio entrance on the fourth
floor of a car park. I shout out her name and the sound echoes under the
concrete ceiling and then I hear her reply come back to me. The door to an
ex-department store is unlocked and we walk through the massive space, barely
lit by citrus-hued fluorescent lights. There are reflective panels on her
industrial overalls, catching this strange light and directing me like an
usher's torch to her studio space. Inside are some familiar paintings of
disaffected twenty-somethings placed randomly around the studio like a morose
party. My attention is directed to the new works, large portrait heads on
titanium white cotton canvases. The subjects are similar to her art school
work, but something new is happening in the paintings. The execution is more
refined and less cluttered. There is plenty of white space showing, the graphic
sense of the paintings is more confident. The interior planes of the faces of
the subjects are stridently represented, recalling Jenny Savill's work, the opposite
of a smoothly rendered photograph or Renaissance painting. This is a zone where
something expressive is occurring. But not expressions, as A.R. Penck once
noted, that can be read like a book, which would be entirely false – instead
they suggest feelings that are hard to name. This is where Kim Kim Kim's
paintings leave behind the normal categories of basic emotions and delve into difficult
undefined areas of feeling which she refers to as "blankness". But
term blankness does not seem to be used to denote emotional neutrality. Blankness
can be associated with an absence of feeling, which could be a way of
describing depression, but equally it could also be about aloofness or
indifference. In Kim Kim Kim's portraits we are directed to territory where we can
then project our own feelings, but the blankness in the work comes with its own
valence; it modifies how those feelings are reflected back to us.
The contrast of surface quality in Kim Kim Kim's paintings,
from large passages of bare canvas to accents of impasto, is a kind of inverted-Bacon
technique, reversed in the sense that the support is not a dark ground. Also,
the accents not are traditional highlights to show form (tonally there are no
higher “notes” than pure white to reach anyway). Instead it is the features,
the expressive planes of the face and the points where the skull is more fully
implicated by the face, where the more intense manipulation of colour of paint
quality occur. This is in itself not unusual, but there is another step to Kim
Kim Kim's work that maintains the viewer's engagement – her sensitive response
to her subjects. In Brent, for
example, she presents with a dissonant mixture of vulnerability and formal
detachment in a young, androgynous male face.
Kim Kim Kim uses digital photographs to project the contours
of her subjects onto the canvas. It is partly this element that makes the works
appear unequivocally from the present time. The structure of the perfect
proportion in these faces reminds us that we live in a screen-based world where
the authority of the digital image is unquestionable – well almost. Kim Kim Kim
finds an interstice somewhere between the cold anti-utopia of relentlessly
posted social media images and the brutality of expressionist painting. In that
confined space, the double-brick gap between the interior and the outside
world, there is room for constricted movement, for contained-feeling or
narrow-banded expression. In a post-ironic age, maybe this is the most anyone can
do at the moment without being labelled naïve.
The expressive plane of the paintings is two-fold. It is
both the face of the subject revealing a projected affect and also the two
dimensional surface of the picture plane, where non-geometric and incidental
gestures occur. This is happening in Kim Kim Kim's work with a controlled
awareness of the inherently abstract nature of painting, through the
calligraphy of the painted mark and formal beauty of the plain white ground. This
is the fulcrum on which Kim Kim Kim's paintings pivot – between formal abstraction and expressive
representation. A mad thylacine in a cage, a fish cell twitching to
artificially induced electrical impulses, reminding us that, in spite of what
the tranquilising light of the LCD screen may be doing to us, we are also still
alive to feeling.
Kevin Robertson is a sessional academic and PhD candidate at
Curtin University.
14 August to 29 August 2015
Opening night Friday 14 August from 6.30pm