LeeEu removes all figurative elements to focus on the materiality of the medium. The artist invites us to a sensitive and highly pictorial experience. We stroll through the fundamentals of painting: gesture, material, color. Sometimes the fleeting image of moss, of furrows dug by the wind. But soon, pure pictoriality takes over in the pleasure of colors and the overflow of elusive materials moved by an internal and mysterious movement. It was during her time as a fine arts major student at Hongik University (Seoul) from which she graduated in 1999, that she learned from the great masters of Dansaekhwa, a Korean non-figurative painting movement born in the 1970s. LeeEu’s love for the fine arts was cultivated and fostered through this experience and is still prominent in her work today. She arrived in France in 2003 and attended the school of decorative arts (École des Arts Décoratifs) in Strasbourg. In 2007, a diploma in hand, she entered a 16 months residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Having these new experiences, as well as encountering artistic movements such as Supports/Surfaces, allowed the artist to broaden her artistic horizons.

‘A self-generated mass of paint’ In that the paint, conforming only to gravity when flowing freely onto and over the edge of the canvas, does not follow the artist’s direction. It is also a ‘voluntary mass of substance’ which, as time passes, conceals the artist’s ‘traces of brushwork on a thin layer of paint’. Therefore, the thick ‘mass of material’ produced by the artist through herding the paint and medium on the canvas is, on a different level, a ‘voluntary painting’ created by the paint itself and it’s transformation according to gravity and time. As artist Lee Eu put it, “this work moves away from the collage technique and the paint is applied directly to the canvas. If each of the shapes placed on or applied to the canvas were previously laid out as a collage, this time I pour the paint directly onto the canvas and shape it with tools like brushes and squeegees.” On this level, the Painting in Question series is a transition from the indirect transformation through collage works to a direct interaction with the canvas. Simultaneously, the canvas is no longer a simple backdrop and becomes the subject of painting along with the wall on which it is placed. While most paintings only highlight the image resulting from the motion of pigments within the frame of the canvas, Painting in Question admits both the inside and outside context of the canvas as an integral component of painting. Hence, the ‘surface on which to paint’ includes not only the surface of the canvas but also its edges and the wall surrounding it. The blob of paint in the Painting in Question series looks as though it is growing, occupying not only the surface but also the sides of the canvas and climbing up the wall like a living organism. The lump of paint, this mass of material, transcends it’s status as a mere component to become ‘painting’ itself. It becomes a ‘voluntary painting’ created by the lump of paint leaving the artist’s hands and transforming itself, influenced only by gravity and time. This series of works in which ‘artist driven time’ and ‘material driven time’ converge into a single layer of matter raise the ‘various questions on painting’ that follow : “Is there a distinction between a painting created by the artist and a painting produced by the material itself?”, “Does the message in an abstract painting stem from consciousness or is it a product of the unconscious?”, “What are the new possibilities of contemporary abstract painting today?” Consequently, artist Lee Eu’s Painting in Question series invites us to reflect on the fundamental essence of painting.

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