Phil Kim "Inuendo" at Bolivar Cafe/Gallery, Santa Monica, California

PHIL KIM
innuendo

curated by Kio Griffith

ARTIST RECEPTION: OCTOBER 5, 2013 from 8 to 10pm
EXHIBIT RUNS: SEPTEMBER 23 to OCTOBER 25, 2013

FREE ADMISSION

BOLIVAR CAFE + GALLERY
1741 Ocean Park Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90405

Cafe Bolivar offers great locally roasted Latin American coffees and Venezuelan Arepas.
Mon - Fri: 7:00 am - 8:30 pm Sat: 8:00 am - 7:00 pm

Bolivar Cafe / Gallery + Cafemode proudly present "Innuendo" solo show by PHIL KIM

My practice explores the fluctuating metafiction of paint – self-referencing itself as a material object in conflict with the nature of creating an image that invokes and recalls preconceived notions of palpable objects, brain stimuli or even images from our own mental database. I question the metaphysical aspect of what a painting is – the illusion that the painted object or subject is real, but if one starts to reason, it is just pigment on canvas, and just actors playing a scene.

The constant consumption of pixelated images, the vicarious living through a movie by creating a fiction that is in constant flux, a reality between the sensorial, corporeal and the intangible. The girl in the poster is just pigment on paper. The pair of legs spreading on the screen is just pixelated desire. Movies are not real. Nothing is but a fiction. My practice is to question the conflicting constant reminder of a self-awareness within the manifolds of a split mind living in an overwhelming image-making culture.

The paintings on canvas remind me of gem clusters containing traces left behind from a slithering paint. The thick protuberances of hues intertwine like sweaty manifestations trying to escape from one another while living in islands of perpetual diffuseness of trompe l'oeil fiction. The painted representation of the figures are as real as the pixelated pictures from the Internet. Touch me. Feel me. I am not just a face. I am materialized viscosity. I am a tangible pixelation of a reality screaming out to be preserved further than the confines of our memory, swimming in the overloading digital stream of disseminated images. My body is made of pixels and cells constantly trapped in its sticky web and never forgotten. I am just pigment. Then I become thick and blurred. You could hold me if you want and caress the slickness of my paint. Or you can digitally pickle me. Slide your fingers over the glass and voyeur my physical absence.


Philip Kim