Raymond Lemstra : FACING SEOUL

Raymond Lemstra (b.1978, Groningen, The Netherlands) graduated from Academie Minerva in 2004 and moved to Amsterdam the following year, where he began his artistic career creating detailed, intricate drawings on paper. These works led him to pursue painting, which he developed in Somo, Spain and more recently in Seoul, South Korea. 

In Lemstra’s mask-like portraits, simple elements such as triangles, lines and circles instantly evoke recognition. Fictional personalities built from impersonal shapes make direct eye-contact, enforced by strong symmetry. These signs don’t need to resemble what they reference, but can symbolise them. This particular selective emphasis can be found in children’s drawings or pre-colonial masks. A triangle is a sign for a nose, a slit is a sign for a mouth. A sign that represents an eye can provoke a much more powerful reaction than an actual eye. This playing with shapes stems from Lemstra’s fascination with pareidolia: a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists (e.g random data). “I am fascinated by how this applies to facial recognition. In my work, I use the portrait as a starting point, then reduce it gradually and invite our facially obsessed perception to fill in the gaps.” 

Lemstra is a draftsman who paints, since his approach to painting often consists of connecting lines instead of creating surfaces, and yet he is very interested in the potential of the paint medium itself. During a residency in Spain, he began incorporating materials from his direct surroundings into his paintings, by working soil and ground rocks directly into the medium. “I enjoyed how this instantly tied my works to the location and my time spent there.” 

When Lemstra moved to South Korea he took this a step further. Because of the overwhelming cultural and language barriers, he found himself preferring to work indoors. To escape this growing inclination, he set himself a goal: interact and connect with his new surroundings by making exploration of the city an essential part of his process. Lemstra chose the many disintegrating wheatpaste posters and advertising stickers found throughout Seoul as his guideline, and began peeling off this decaying ‘skin’ of the city. This revealed a completely new layer of interaction with his surroundings - unexciting places that might be avoided suddenly became goldmines. Lemstra collected materials from hundreds of small dark alleys and lampposts, and with these constructed the rough surfaces that served as the foundation for his paintings. 

Lemstra regards these surfaces as collages of moments; while working in the studio he relives the city. Eventually, the memory of taking a fragment of the city at a specific place becomes subordinate to the long presence these remnants have had out in the world. The material’s state of deterioration has an unconventional beauty and invites to imagine a long trail of memories and history - of the countless messages every generation leaves for each other throughout time. 

While working in both the cumulative and subtractive processes of collage and décollage, this new Korean layer finds its home. In this process, the importance of narrative depiction shifts towards the connections between materials and textures. A new kind of balance needs to be created, one which veers easily into chaos, and the difficulty in managing this parallels his own experience in situating his Dutch self in Korean society.

출처 : 갤러리밈