Art salon de H
홍일화 Hong Il hwa
< 햇살의 표기법 Écriture de la lumière>
2024.6.5 - 2024.7.13
빛이 머무는 자리 0328, oil on canvas, 145.5x112.1cm 2024
Sunlight's writing
The forest and nature as a subject in painting is far from being recent. The artists started a modest debut with the landscape as the main subject from the 15th century. It is therefore not an easy task to take such a common subject in painting and to rethink it in the light of a contemporary thought.
Yet Hong Ilhwa’s painting is refreshing with positivity, dense and generously expressed. One imagines the artist’s world as peaceful and restful. An enchanted forest, lulled by light without the night ever interrupting it.
There is not more meaningful symbol of meditation as the tree, surrounded by silence, which listens one by one to those who comes to it to bring their pain. In that way, the nature of Hong Ilhwa is a welcoming, meditative but above all fantastic nature.
The play of light and movement as well as the precision of the curves reveal a long work of observation of the tree and its environment. Flowers, light or perhaps even fireflies, the lexical field of the artist fully integrates that of nature. And to achieve this luminous result, the artist’s paint in a meticulous and long executed way because every detail counts in a whole. Some paintings seem to blind us, like a gaze turned towards the sun. Difficult in painting, Hong Ilwha knows how to make living the colours throughout the light. The coexistence between the two seems natural.
가시빛0420, Oil on canvas, 100x100cm, 2024
The artist’s paintings take us out of our real space to transport us into a world inhabited by light. Neither realistic, nor really surreal, Hong Ilhwa deconstructs touch by touch what brings us closer to reality. It represents an in-between world, halfway between his imagination and nature that is discovered in the early morning bathed by the “morning dew”. A natural mechanism invisible to the eyes of man, which appears when the air is clear and the sky is serene, thus represented in its most beautiful form by the artist.
Lisa Lebel
