...To the rear of the art space is the Fellowship Gallery, holding “But Nothing Happening”, a revelatory assortment of paintings & drawing by 2010-2011 A.I.R Fellowship Artist, Jiyoon Koo. In this room I am reminded of a thought that I had at a recent Joan Mitchell show; “this is the language of painting.” Koo handles her media with an ease and an unforced confidence that, like all skilled artists, makes the challenges of her undertaking seem effortless. In the emerald gem, “Sinking Ship” the artist convincingly suggests, in the most economic of strokes, a canoe sinking into a verdant swamp. Close by, “Bonfire” abstracts a large pyre through intuitive jabs and daubs of oil paint at canvas. This night fire seems inverted though, a ghostly film negative rendered in candied yellows and reds against a blackened turquoise ground.
The artist paints portraits as well, exemplified by the emotive and layered, “Puberty” and “Trick Mirror”, impactful smears of color and line peering out at us quizzically from the frame. Lastly, against a snowy paper field, Koo methodically applies cursive cross hatch and scribble in graphite marks that converge and scatter, indicating a landscape seen from above. In this, her first solo show, Jiyoon Koo asserts that she is fluent in the vocabularies of a few different media.
by Enrico Gomez, May 01, 2011
http://wagmag.org/reviewDisplay.php?id=117