Richard Tuttle and Choong Sup Lim at Tempo | Seoul
Two-person reveals are at all times a danger. Not each pairing is convincing. “How Objects Grasp Their Magic,” Tempo’s juxtaposition of works by Richard Tuttle and Choong Sup Lim—two artists of the identical age and era who come from starkly totally different contexts and traditions of figuration and illustration—appears at first a curious match. Whereas its poster locations Lim and Tuttle’s work side-by-side, the exhibition is cut up between two flooring, every devoted to a single artist. Regardless of this bodily separation, a sure sensitivity resonates all through. On the psychovisual stage, each artists wield an open understanding of the abject: not the darkish and somber Bataillean form, however a extra poetic and optimistic kind (that’s, if you happen to may ever name the abject “optimistic”).
Lim’s flooring begins with a sequence of formed canvases. Their fibrous painterly surfaces recall natural life types, whereas their distinctive shapes trace at botanical components corresponding to seeds, leaves, and grains. Like most plant merchandise, their important vitality appears contained throughout the pores and skin: not precisely alive, however not fairly lifeless both. Tuttle’s show opens with Euterpe (music), 2019, which cobbles collectively a primitive coat of arms from plastic spoons piled atop a chunk of Tupperware connected to an assemblage of wall-mounted plywood. The vivid blue of the artificial lid, the yellow swath of bunched canvas, and a deep V of emerald inexperienced spray paint elevate the composition from chaos into a up to date engagement with shade, materials, and stability.
In producing wall-based objects, each artists cleave to the tenets of the painterly course of. Whereas these highly effective endeavors deserve solo consideration, their proximity to one another is synergetic, because it highlights their distinctive but equally renewed relationship to the mission of portray.
