Nevertheless, the Brooklyn Front gallery managed to show works by some really interesting artists. One of those artists was Jin Meyerson. Jin lived and worked in Brooklyn at the time Mark was operating his gallery. He was still relatively early to his career, and and was presumably still developing his practice as an artist. But judging by the stuff he's doing now, Jin has always been a tremendously gifted artist. Jin lived and worked in Brooklyn at the time Mark was operating his gallery. He's since moved, and now divides his time between Paris and Seoul.
Although I have my own take on Jim's work, Wikipedia has a decent primer on Jin's method and his paintings:
Jin Meyerson’s paintings are schizophrenic semi-abstractions based on throwaway images from magazines and other random pieces of visual culture. Although the use of media imagery is common ground for many contemporary painters, Meyerson’s take on the topic is more manic than most; while artists such as Ulrich Lamsfuss, Johannes Kahrs and Gerhard Richter are more concerned with the faithful – almost obsessive – copy, Meyerson’s takes his source material as a sketch which he can distort, tear apart, rearrange and fill with psychedelic colour. Meyerson does not completely destroy or obscure the images, but by the end of his more-or-less unplanned interventions the painting’s origin is severely disguised. Most of Mayerson’s work displays his fascination with moving images, but for him a moment of speed or activity caught on film is not enough; the addition of swirling bands of striking colour add to the sense of motion to create something that functions beyond the limits of painting and photography, making the viewer ‘feel’ the energy of the image and invoke the spectacle of real life action when the moment itself is long over.It's interesting--and perhaps a little reckless--to write Jin's work off as 'schizophrenic,' and 'manic.' His work is anything but. Although the images he paints are wild, featuring layers of distorted images juxtaposed upon each other, his actual paintings are absolutely meticulous executed. The surfaces of his paintings are not like a De Kooning or a Pollock. They're smooth. So what looks like unplanned, hallucinatory images--chaos--is actually the product of a lot of planning and a lot of control. It's one of the unique features of beginning the composition process on a computer.
One of the things I think Wikipedia leaves out is a particularly important motif in Jin's work: crowds. Jin's best works appear to be those with crowds. There is a certain resonance in pairing images of a crowd--which is by definition large, and wild--with a canvas that is equally large:
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| Carpal Fatigue, 2010 |
This particular painting, Carpal Fatigue, is truly monumental--something approaching a masterpiece. I haven't fully understood its symbolism yet. Jin has left us with a very "matter of fact" title--maybe in an effort to keep the meaning ambiguous. There's certainly no shortage of narratives you could build around this work. Salvation. Consumption. Circular envy. It's all there.
And on the basis of its painterly qualities alone, there's also plenty gape at. The way Jin blends colors, and pulls colors off of the edges of the images he distorts, exaggerating the chromatic aberration he's painted. Jin bends perspectives and plays with your mind. In some spots, he allows arms and hands to 'emerge' from the smooth, marbled waterfall of liquid limbs that flows like a slow lava up the sides of the painting. It's really fucking nuts. It's gonna take me a while to fully comprehend this piece.
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| a small corner section of the larger painting. |
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