Treachery Skin at No. 9 Cork Street, London plays with the inherant physicality and immediacy of abstraction
A snake, depending on your perspective or belief system, could signify any number of things. According to the Abrahamic religions, it represents ‘naughty’ things: desire, temptation, cunning, deceitfulness. To most older religions and beliefs, however, it symbolises the transcendental: magic, transformation, healing and the cyclic nature of the cosmos, spiritual awakening, regeneration, wisdom, creation.
Eunsil Lee’s recent painting Tentacle (2024) is a vivid blue wash of a snake’s torso that seems to weave in and over itself, its scales highlighted in a light ochre, so that it appears to be reflecting sunlight; it’s unclear where the snake begins and ends. In Deep Inside (2024), its energy more fraught, the snake’s sand-coloured torso writhes against darkness, its scales sharp and jagged. Such closeup, but still ambiguous, perspectives are common across Lee’s work. Making use of ink on hanji paper, the paintings foreground colour and texture while giving hints towards ways in which the marks created might potentially be read, such as in the Edgy Heart (2020) series, where fine purplish-red lines weave their way across a peach-coloured backdrop. It could be a muted abstraction, but it could also be seen as varicose veins bursting under human skin. Other works appear as if hazy fog-filled landscapes, murky, green-hued environments – possibly underwater, or a more elusive, imaginary realm. In one such painting, Disassociated Memory (2021), an outline of a brain floats in the foreground, with nerves branching out beneath it like a jellyfish.
This tension between fact and fugue, between association and disassociation, runs through Lee’s work. The snakes and brains set up a series of winding, entangled paths that suggest both dream associations and inherited instincts (which is sometimes referred to as the ‘reptilian complex’). As Lee’s exhibition title suggests, there’s a treachery to this, a question of whether we can trust the surface, or dig deeper. Of course, by definition, Tentacle and Deep Inside are paintings made up of a series of actions: each scale is a mark made in ink, the repetition of which creates the overall illusion of a snake’s body. Perhaps that’s where the real treachery lies – in our own minds, so easily manipulated, constantly driven to infer meaning from and make sense of a series of abstract images. And maybe that’s a lesson in sloughing off old patterns of thought.
Treachery Skin at No. 9 Cork Street, London, through 23 October
This preview features in the ArtReview Korea Supplement, a special publication celebrating contemporary Korean art, supported by Korea Arts Management Service
