Hanna Hur. Red Ecstatic

About

Hanna Hur serves at the pleasure of her paintings. Her paintings seem to possess a will of their own; their strict stipulations inscribed in ancient code of square and circle, lines horizontal and vertical, are their terrain. A spiral takes us down. They emerge slowly as a veil lifts and settle solidly as rock sediment. By way of stealthy inner vision, they seem discharged fully formed through a colossal space-time continuum, seeded by the titanic cosmic painting from which all arise. Hur is a bearer of messages, and we, her paintings’ testees. It’s a struggle to keep our perceptual step in sync with the metronome of her enveloping canvases. For in all their relentless discipline, the artist's structures are fleeting; in continual opposition to stasis, they complement each other as much as they conflict.

In this mind-bending in-situ continuation of Hur's synthesizing of architectural space in her exhibitions: the checkerboard floor of the gallery mirrors the painting's internal grids, drawn tight across our field of vision. The swells of thin paint underlying ruled edges are a necessary blanket of touch to draw us deeper into barely visible nets. Reliefs of colored pencil sit smoothly, rigidly on the tooth of the canvas surface, their uniform width, a display of power. Whose power is this? Is it Hur’s queered virtuosity, or does it reside in demands made of her by the painting? When positioned directly in front of the paintings, our instrument of sight shifts into high gear in an attempt to merge visual input with meaning. As familiar and foreign as our neurological response, the diagrams appear to picture the optic nerve as it transports its pulses to the industrial complex of the brain. Just as we seize on a tenuous resolution, the painting’s key evaporates, reemerging again as a riddle to be solved. Mesmerizing and Sphinx-like, the artist’s images fill a room with their curious authority and inexplicable agency, holding us in a zone of transcendental phenomenology—few paintings by Hur’s contemporaries match.