Artists

Hyunsun Jeon

Press release

"I dream a lot" says Hyunsun Jeon. In her paintings, she tries to capture the diffuse feelings that persist when you wake up, when what remains of your dreams are impressions, colours and hybrid shapes – impossible syntheses of real memories. But Jeon's painting, however dreamlike, is above all driven by a concrete quest: what is an image, what is representation ?

In altar paintings from the 15th century found in Italy and the Netherlands, the window opens onto a landscape and tells a story that complements or illustrates the main scene. In the 20th century, Matisse turned it into an allegory of painting itself; each painting is an open window onto the artist's inner world. In Jeon's work, the window divides the composition and allows different levels of reading and interpretation. The subjects that unfold here are rooted in her memory and imagination. Memories of fairytales, taken from her more figurative paintings of 10 or 15 years earlier, appear here in singular effects of colour and material.

The jerky contours reveal Jeon's interest in pixelization. The images that have surrounded us for the last thirty years are essentially digital. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, they were characterised by imprecise outlines and an initially limited number of squares (pixels), which increased steadily as technology advanced. When she was younger, Hyunsun Jeon saw her video games as forms and spaces structured by pixels, which she now recreates by superimposing images and materials. On the canvas, the geometric figures and flat areas of colour reveal the technical process that produced them: it becomes the very subject of the painting.