Exhibition Information

			Among the numerous other media of the same time, how does painting continue?

What modernist painting aspired to was the internal completeness of the pictorial medium. Since conceptual art, art practice has appeared to shift weight to the idea of the author who designs it, and modern media specificity has become ineligible. Now, conversation is just one of many other media based on post-media conditions. Jan Verwoert, an art critic, deals with simultaneous paintings that are placed under a conflict between media specificity and conceptuality in the Because they Think It's a Good Idea. In short, conversation can no longer be just conversation. Conversation can and should only be considered in the context of many other media. In this relationship, however, conversation is asked to converse constantly with its own history as a medium. When a painting expresses its material characteristics, symbolic grammar and formal language to justify its position among different media, it inevitably becomes conceptual. Tension between media specificity and conceptuality is placed on canvas.

Painting continues on itself in that way. Two writers of the exhibition Vera Verto, Park Je-ho and Lee Yeon-seok, speak of the situation in their respective ways. Social manifestations are latent in their work, which at first glance appear to be abstract form experiments. These canvas have no hesitation in attracting and sending the advertising language grammar of capitalist goods into themselves. The mention of canvas and optical devices with tags, and canvas hanging from brackets that use industrial materials make painting look like a commodity, one of many others. On the other hand, blurred religious images and canvas listed in the form of tryptique refer in a new way to old traditions of art history. Surfaces such as scratched or stamped somewhere, surfaces with a completely uniform texture, and crocodile skin talk about the materiality of painting through painting.

The complexities of these paintings converge under the title of the exhibition. Vera Verto is a magic spell that transforms mice into glasses. I think of a glass that stopped while the order was being invoked, half a mouse and half a glass. The quantitativeity of this glass is precisely the aesthetic dimension of these paintings. To secure one's own validity through scrutiny of one's own history and to create one's own place in the constellation that many others have made. That's how the conversation goes.