ART'LOFT — BEYOND THE VISIBLE

05 : MOON-PIL SHIM BIOGRAPHY
Moon-Pil Shim was born on April 20, 1958, in Daegu, South Korea. Graduated of the School of Fine Arts at Young-Nam University (South Korea), he lives and works in Essonne, France.

The artist's approach is based on an alternation between colored linearity and entanglement of colored fields. Functioning like a rhythm, the parallelisms of the traces that he executes allows kinetic effects that appear through transparent plexiglas or in the most recent works through translucent plexiglas. These ranges of colors spread uniformly and smoothly are most often crossed by one or more colored lines, traced with a cutter inside the color and then again colored but differently. Sometimes the accidents of the traces are deliberately preserved in order to avoid an approach of the drawing which would be too mechanical.

The lines, spaced or close together, cut and modulate the flat surfaces, introducing a rhythm in the relations of colors and spaces. To the stability of the rectangular colored spaces, they add a dynamic perception, open, according to the horizontal. What strikes at the outset is the oscillation between transparency, sharpness, solid lines, colored lines and plexiglass, on one hand, and the milky, atmospheric presence of the white background ("a first snow" Tanizaki would have said), on the other hand,thus creating an imprecise, distant mysterious depth that pull the perception towards a space in recess.

In more recent works, and as he did in the 1% of Beaucaire College, Moon-Pil Shim inscribes the play of lines and surfaces in a contemporary opaque material (the Corian). The pieces presented for this exhibition are wall structures whose various faces develop orientations that are both different and harmonious an that the view can not embrace at one blow. Colored lines and surfaces, freely, emphasize or contradict these orientations, introducing a still greater complexity in our perception of the geometry of the work. As with the earlier works, all the salient and immediate aspects of these pieces are added by the distance and the occultation, by the withdrawal, the hollow or the closed, an obviousness which crosses them and allows them to work . There is access only by detours.

(Text excerpt :
Pierre Emmanuel, 2012)