|
 |
D. Dominick Lombardi
D. Dominick Lombardi is a New York-based artist, curator, and writer. In December 2007, Sobin Park’s work was on view in a solo exhibition Beauty and the Beast at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York, a non-profit organization dedicated to Japanese culture and international art forms.
Sobin Park, Deep Flavor-Essence I, 2007. Graphite pencil on paper, 59 x 56 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
William Shakespeare referred to sexual intercourse as “the beast with two backs”—something of a fitting description for the works of Sobin Park, on display at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York. Park’s art, and the obsessiveness, sexuality, beauty, and beastliness portrayed in the act of love making, and the passion and pleasure evidenced in the forms—however dark or deadly—relates directly to that Shakespearian metaphor. Freud would have a field day!
You would be hard pressed to find a better example of drawing. With their heavily applied graphite and sparse colors, they are very powerful and arresting. I can just see the artist’s fingers bending against the hard wooden cylinder of wood that holds the soft, slippery graphite as she relentless covers the large format paper with the shiny substance. I can imagine the movements of her body—her back arching, her body swaying—as she makes great sweeps of motion to get those marks down. Her continuous lines are endless and countless. Their intensity never lets up, from the farthest reaches of the paper’s corners, to the core of the composition.
Contrast is key. As is the play between the light, translucent skin of the woman against her dark and heavily textured lover—a sexual and sinister being whose body is bubbling up like lava, curving, curling in clumps and clusters, with a face that harkens back to ancient dragons.
In many instances, the graphite gets so thick, so built up, and so intense it looks like steel wool. Yet the skin of the woman, especially in Dream, 2007, is fleshy, and dotted with curly, pubic hair-like accent lines, almost like the residue of a romance.
Earlier I mentioned Freud, and I even see references to Freudian era artists in Park’s art. In Essence III, 2007, the woman’s right hand is straight out of an Egon Schiele work, while her left hand, which cradles a crescent moon, is Gustav Klimt-like in its symbolism. Even some of the poses in the various drawings, especially in their freeness of form, are Schiele and Klimt-like. Love and sex are psychological warfare. Like love and sex, these images are executed with a deep, dark, overpowering, and omnipotent pleasure.
You could even place Park’s work in the company of some pretty wild pre-Surrealists. Park’s power as an artist is not unlike the effect that Arnold Bocklin’s The Maiden, Merman, and Sea Monster, Carlos Schwabe’s Depression an Ideal, 1907, Mikhail Vrubel’s The Demon 1902, or Jean Delville’s The Treasure of Satan, 1895. It’s a visceral thing, churning up emotion and thought right from the gut.
In one large horizontal piece titled Love of Young and a Woman, a woman becomes a beast as she flies through skies of paisley with a boat full of Buddhist monks on her back. Could this be a reference to this group of works on display as a journey to oneness?
