| The division of the soul from the body is an issue that has concerned great thinkers throughout the history of mankind. The understanding of soul, according to Plato, concerned an eternal system of pure and real knowledge with the potential of merging with the absolute, divine good. The body was a mistake, an obsolete machine entrapping the imperishable in a decadent circle of disillusions. Time made sense as a just dimension, the ruler of practically everything and the guardian of infinite balance. The everlasting pacemaker in the unchanging game of life. |  |
Seok Lee – Christos Ganos
The division of the soul from the body is an issue that has concerned great thinkers throughout the history of mankind. The understanding of soul, according to Plato, concerned an eternal system of pure and real knowledge with the potential of merging with the absolute, divine good. The body was a mistake, an obsolete machine entrapping the imperishable in a decadent circle of disillusions. Time made sense as a just dimension, the ruler of practically everything and the guardian of infinite balance. The everlasting pacemaker in the unchanging game of life.
Through the works of Seok Lee, a German artist of Korean origin, one escapes from the confinement of any Platonic dimension simply by devoting his soul and body, his mind and flesh, his energy and mass to the continuum of moments with which he is interacting. With an impressive series of works created mainly during the last four years, Seok Lee has succeeded in creating some unique concepts regarding time and space, and overlaid with the ideas of human perception, understanding, sensibilities and the need for experimentation. With paintings consisting of landscapes, buildings and people as his starting point, the artist both determines and eliminates the boundaries of reality and imagination by fiercely adding multiple gentle elements of a kind of liquid vagueness. In doing so, he essentially denies the coupled impossibilities of objectivity and subjectivity, polarity and neutrality, stasis and action.
Works like Ideoplasma Nr. 2 and gegenwärtig Nr. 1 merge the epistemological and the infinite into a philosophical denial of both. The result is pure aesthetic creation that forces viewers to become participants in an escape from time by capturing them by way of its limits. Ich-Surrogate und andere Un-Fälle in der Malerei Nr.1 (I-surrogate and other Accidents/Non-Cases in Painting) explores the morphology of the isolated being through an honest interpretation of its phenomenology. The untitled urban and rural landscapes offer an evolutionary approach to the incoherent and ambivalent entirety of reality by a modified recursive synthesis completed in two steps. A process of static relativity in which the first step is defining the outline of the main view, while the second extrapolates a more specific reality, superimposed upon and deduced from it.
What Seok Lee has created so far is a system of multiple Heterotopias or displacements for the mind and body. He creates a salvation from antinomy and a solution for our critical understanding of life. This is to say, he creates a rupture upon many possible eugenic systemizations of shape through exemplified para-real configurations. His works are examples of a non-linear process through a series of onto- and chrono-genetic moments.
His paintings redefine being, time and space, denying them their typical absolute acceptance. They establish a synthesis through the collision of opposing forces, generating a primordial chaos, which is, after all, the highest of harmonies that we know.
Seok Lee is organizing a new exhibition in Pusang, Korea, and currently exhibiting in two galleries in Germany. The artist has already exhibited in various galleries in London, Madrid, Berlin, Hamburg and other major European cities.
