represent

Romantic photorealism

Deconstruction and Blue Lights

Romantic photorealism

There are a few days left to see Crosswalk at Arcadia Contemporary. Sung Eun Kim’s photorealistic New York street scenes have a distinct and consistent aura of city life’s tranquil energy. He tinges it with yearning. The paintings offer a window onto mundane and overlooked urban views so commonplace as to be unnoticed by the habitual pedestrian. I delivered six of my newest paintings to Arcadia on Saturday and lingered long enough to be captivated by Kim’s approach to New York City. His subject and execution is similar to how Richard Estes offered indelible views of busy, everyday streets. But in many ways, Kim is a yin response to the yang of Estes. Estes favored bright daylight on commonplace, quotidian haunts: diners, florists, cigar shops and nearly anything mundane enough to be invisible to anyone walking past it every day. His painted surface, up close, shows discreet, similarly defined marks, rigorously and masterfully applied in such a way that the crisp, hard edges of a city street pop from the canvas. Kim’s vision is less illuminated, moodier, drawn to twilight, overcast days and night. Even his mid-day scenes put the viewer into the haven of a shaded length of street, with the full light kept at a distance. His Old Police Headquarters, showing how two seemingly parallel streets converge, hints at Waverly Place by Estes. His handling of paint gives evidence of marks, but the paint moves more fluently from light to dark than it does in Estes. The feel of each painting is at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The pleasure of Estes is how his deadpan rendering of the most unpicturesque subjects becomes beautiful in a Zen way, where the suchness of anything he turns his attention to offers a viewer the unique joy of being distinctly what it is, interesting and wonderful in itself when given sustained attention. With Kim, the rain-drenched surfaces of his street reflect light from various directions, and the overhead haze diffuses the sun, so that headlights and streetlights glow beyond a lone figure in a crosswalk, all of it conveying a world both old and new, freshened by the weather, hinting at mysteries where details get lost in distance. The stand-out painting in the show, which sold quickly, is Deconstruction and Blue Lights, a constrained view, from below, of what looks like the Queensboro Bridge but not quite. You stand in the night below, on the street, looking up toward the sky, with the bridge visible only between an apartment building and another building with a large arched opening, lit from inside, like the door for trucks in an old firehouse. Gazing up, your eye follows a thin necklace of lights hanging from the towers of the bridge, and then you see open windows in the apartment building along the right side of the painting, each of them lit up, though no one is visible inside. It’s like a little, sidelong homage to Rear Window.  The light cloud cover in the night sky is perfectly rendered, lit up from below by the city’s incandescence. The cinematic quality of these paintings give them a contemporary sense of this crowded city’s abundant opportunities for solitude. Not many photorealists offer a vision as romantic as Kim’s.