The Western Australian Art Museum

July 21, 2015

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

MERENDA CONTEMPORARY

The F word – An exhibition of Australian Figurative painting
Gallery Central
12 Aberdeen St Perth
gallery@central.wa.edu.au

Artist floor talk – Friday 14th of November at 10.30am

In discussion with the artist Thomas Hoareau and artist and curator Kevin Robertson.
Academic and Artist Nicole Slatter from Curtin University will lead a discussion with artist Thomas Hoareau and Artist/ curator Kevin Roberston along with some of the other exhibiting artists.
‘The tradition of figurative painting goes in and out of fashion but audiences never fail to be seduced by the figure and representational art; and figurative Australian artists continue to observe and translate the world, from the everyday to the spectacular, with passion and nuance.’

This exhibition features Nicole Slatter, Thomas Hoareau, Kevin Robertson, Richard Gunning from Perth and Tom Alberts, Stewart MacFarlane, Nerissa Lea and Yvette Coppersmith from around Australia, with prints by Richard Bosman, USA

Kevin Robertson's Heathcote Studio Session.

Painting the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater

Caspar Fairhall: Below is Above

"So Hollow, So Pure" by Kim Kim Kim

The F word

Joanna Lamb and Kevin Robertson