Urban Poetry |
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Cities, no less than natural landscapes, are subject to erosion by the elements, to the shifting effects of time, to the osscilation between degeneration and rebirth. Taiwanese born painter Y.J. Cho is a chronicler of these changes, recording the ever changing city face and celebrating the beauty born of decay.
Although they are set in New York and Paris, there is nothing specifically French or American about these closely observed cityscapes. Instead, focusing on the old neighborhoods which can be found off the showy boulevards and over built downtown areas of any urban setting, Cho presents what she describes as the "universal language" of cities. In all cities, man-made structures are eroded by weather, baked by summer heat, pelted by spring rains worn down by the tread of heavy feet. Cho shows how wooden steps develop gentle indentations at the points of greatest pressure, how plaster peels away from walls to reveal an underlayer of weathered brick, how flaking paint make striking abstract patterns on battered doors.
But despite the acknowledgment of the inevitable ravages of time, these are not melancholy paintings. Sunlight splashes over a patch of wall, a pot of bright azaleas perches on a window sill, a spray of red and green graffiti breaks across a discolored door and suddenly we are reminded that change, growth and decay are very much a part of life.
Although they are derived from photographs and display a realism that is breathtakingly convincing, these are by no means photo-realist paintings. Photorealism hinges on the illusion that the hand can work as mechanically as a machine, leaving behind no trace of its passage over the canvas and that the eye is a surrogate camera lens whose narrow field of resolution leaves edges blurred and distorted. By contract Cho corrects the camera's distortion, preferring to present her scenes the eye actually sees them as it sweeps across space. She builds up her surfaces with an almost imperceptible layer of gesso, subtly enhancing the textures her brush carefully records. And perhaps most significantly, she departs from the conventional photorealist preoccupation with the high tech surfaces, reflective glass and metal and the visual jumble of urban civilization. Instead, Cho is interested in the old quarters which have been somehow magically preserved from the relentless development and redevelopment of the modern city.
A comparison of the paintings and the photographs from which they are derived reveals how many decisions and aesthetic judgments are involved in the creation of these apparently photographically accurate compositions. Each painting is an amalgam of a number of photographs each taken from a slightly different angle and with a slightly different lighting. In paintings whose effects depend on an understated unity of elements, the artist subdues certain colors to keep them from popping out from the whole. In other paintings marked by a high degree of contrast between light and shadow or by intricate undulations of space, shapes and hues may be exaggerated. Areas which, from a distance appear to be remarkably convincing passages of cracked concrete or peeling paint are revealed, close up, to be abstract patterns flecked with improbable shades of blue, green or red. Six feet away, a wall, ledge and shutter may all appear to be approximately the same shade of white, but from six inches, the are distinctly different mixes of closely related hues.
Cho was born in Taiwan in 1950 and went to college at the Taiwan Normal University. In 1976 she moved to new York to study art at the State University of New York at Albany. Since 1977 she has lived and worked in New York City.
Cho's current work has evolved out of a long time interest in the abstract qualities that form the basis of a highly realistic style. Before turning to her current subject matter, she created a series of paintings which represented clusters of bananas, peeled and unpeeled, blown up to an enormous scale so that patterns of light and color, and contrasts between the textures of smooth skin and pulpy fruit were greatly exaggerated. In these paintings, as in her current work, subjects were chosen as much for their ability to be subjected to detailed visual analysis as for their thematic possibilities. Thus Cho resolves the apparent contradiction between abstraction and realism by showing that they cannot really be separated.
Much painting today appeals only to a limited number of human faculties - to the eye's need for visual stimulation, to the mind's demand for recognizable subject matter, to the heart's desire for images that speak of everyday experience. Cho combines all these qualities in paintings who power and presence shines thorough the canvas like sunlight that dapples her city streets.