Color Me Skeptical — Couch in the Desert

*Color Me Skeptical,* The Studio @ Sahara West Library, March 1 - May 18, 2024.

Color Me Skeptical at The Studio, Sahara West Library

by Lel Kihm

Darren Johnson’s curation underlines Lel Kihm’s written declaration about his practice: “Each painting is a rupture from the one that came before it.“ One painting is straitened red and white with Franz Kline bars, another one has a handpainted grid in multiple colours, a third has a field of green pitching down the canvas a little like a Diebenkorn; the most recent one is mostly blocks of scuffed earth tones on unprimed canvas. But even someone who is consciously focused on rupture has built a repertoire of marks that move through from one canvas to another, giving him tools to work with. Straight lines. Spots. An early work from 2020 shows Kihm trying out a different method – the canvas is marked with a creases to show you that he has folded it before applying paint and then unfolded it to discover his composition. The fact that he studied art in Paris makes me think of Simon Hantaï’s pliage, but this is not the same. His folds are gridded rather than crumpled. He has included a realistic painting of a folded paper boat in primary colours near one corner of the painting, hinting that his folds are a form of play.

Untitled, In a row, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 in, 2023.

After 2020, the act of discovery gets absorbed into the act of painting. He paints an orange spot over a blue spot, leaving a scratchiness in the orange paint so I can see the ghost of the other colour underneath, or he splats bright childen’s colours on the canvas and then paints them almost completely out with black. I don’t know if he’s inspired by Hantai’s younger peer, Bernard Piffaretti (he shows no sign of wanting to copy the technique that Piffaretti is known for, the habit of painting everything twice), but these drips and dots reminded me of an interview where Piffaretti describes one of his works:

“In one area, there’s a particular blue drip on the white ground. Visually, it automatically attaches itself to a circle a little bit above it that has been covered with green paint. Here again, the viewer is given the possibility of remaking the painting.”

Untitled (close up), Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 62 in, 2023.

The possibility of remaking the painting is the primary theme of Color Me Skeptical. When Kihm paints a composition with orange and black stripes and covers some of them with semi-transparent grey slush I feel that a finished painting has been redacted and replaced with an experiment, a question – what happens if we do this instead? And what would happen if we did something else? How would it look without that grey? I imagine that the application of the grey was like the act of folding and unfolding in the earlier painting. It’s a “rupture,” to borrow his word. It’s pretty much right in the middle, so the rupture becomes the subject of the painting. I couldn’t stop wanting to laugh at it. The rest of the work looks like the exciting silhouette of a super-sexy rock guitar flying in a psychedelic sunset while dynamic stripes prop it up like scaffolding, but my eye kept going to this grubby smear.

Like a comedian, Kihm shows me he can control his violence, his “expressiveness,” his splat. Spontaneity was only one phase, the passionate mark was calculated, or it became calculated in retrospect when he erased it. There is the sense sometimes that he’s talking back to other artists. Hey Jasper Johns, it’s nice that you painted a target, now I’m going to throw something at it. His artist statement echoes another Piffaretti line from the same interview: “Figures always appear, whether from the history of art or from the real world of the street, of architecture, of billboards, but for me they arrive through the ‘petite porte,’ that’s to say through the practice of painting.”

Untitled, Making a painting : Folding a boat, Oil and pigment ink on canvas, 46 x 36 in, 2020.

Maybe this is why he stopped making his folded paintings? Maybe the technique seemed too mechanical and complete? You fold, you paint, you unfold, and your work is kind of done? The addition of the paper boat suggests that he might have felt it needed something more, something else, and maybe “something else” was actually a completely different way of working, not an addition to the fold painting but a move away from it? The more traditional method gives you freedom to come and go from the canvases, you can leave a painting for a month and come back, make another decision, go away and come back, go away ... You can unfold and unfold and unfold … The erasures in Skeptical are not like the erasures in a painting by Amy Sillman, where the cancellations suggest that we’re seeing different phases of a line moving, as if her shapes experience the canvas as a landscape where they can take independent action. Kihm’s shapes are sometimes posed as if they might move (I’m thinking of the 2022 “Untitled” with tumbling constructivist-y rectangles) but their relationship is with him, outside the painting in front of them, deciding on their fate. By giving us those hints of the other colours he lets me in on the action too, even letting me judge him–hey Lel, you shoulda left that blue … His marks are not only vulnerable to him, his brush; they make him vulnerable to me.

*Color Me Skeptical,* The Studio @ Sahara West Library, March 1 - May 18, 2024, Gallery Shot.

A painting is a place where change can happen. This idea is at its most extreme in the one where he erases almost everything and aside from a few drips it is difficult to tell what used to be there–I can only see that there were circles interlocking in a sort of, what, mutant Olympic ring formation standing on one end? The top left corner is painted grotty off-lime yellow. That triangular shape is awkward, it doesn’t fill the corner neatly. The opposite corner has the faint ghost of another triangle that could have been filled in to create a symmetry like a pair of stage curtains. There that real estate sits, waiting to receive something that might never arrive. Everything you might have thought you wanted into a painting is not there. I stood there, full of admiration, saying to the person next to me, “This painting is an asshole.”

I was going to end there because it felt like a good punchline but I want to add that Lel himself is not an asshole. If he had made that psychedelic guitar painting without the redaction then I hope I would have looked at it and thought, “But no … he needs to do something more … what? … I don’t know…” I treasure Color Me Skeptical because reminds me to think about that what?

Color Me Skeptical is on view at The Studio, Sahara West Library through May 18, 2024.

Lel Kihm is a South Korean-born American artist living and working in Las Vegas. He graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris, France, with Diplôme national supérieur d'arts plastiques (DNSAP). Recent group exhibitions include Am I Your Type and The Emotional Show, held at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, NV.

Reviewed and written by Deanne Sole