PARK – PERROTIN
Perrotin is pleased to present Not Quite Tomorrow, GaHee Park’s second solo exhibition in Paris and her sixth with the gallery. In this new series, Park unveils paintings that depict seemingly idyllic scenes disrupted by subtle distortions. Drawing from the timeless tradition of still life, she captures sensual and intimate moments, yet her distinctive use of forced perspective unsettles the tranquility, introducing ambivalence and tension. Through this body of work, Park challenges both form and narrative, suspending her subjects in a surreal collapse of time and space.
The strange and ethereal world of GaHee Park’s paintings is populated with doubles of various kinds. Whether as shadow figures or gleaming reflections, an extra set of limbs or lips, a bird or a woman with an extra eye, these are not identical doppelgangers but they are nevertheless uncanny. Often the effect of this doubling is something like that of a reversible image: focusing on one mouth, the figure seems content, focusing on the other mouth, she seems forlorn. Our own gaze is itself doubled by the mechanisms of Park’s skilled doubling. Borrowing a moniker once given to René Magritte, we might dub GaHee Park the Master (Mistress?) of the double take.
We may find in these doubles an echo of the duck-rabbit that fascinated Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For both, the duckrabbit reveals the phenomenon of “seeing-as.”1 Seeing is never simply seeing, it is always seeing-as; interpretation is always already at play. The painter’s gaze is particularly attentive to this fact because, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, the painter’s objects are not altogether real objects: “Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color; like ghosts these objects have only visual existence. The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing.”2 Because it can be seen as this thing or as that, the duck-rabbit illustrates the endless play permitted by the ambiguity of the image. But the figures in Park’s paintings are not like the duck-rabbit, infinitely reversing themselves and revealing the perils of interpretation. Rather, the figures that compel a double take in Park’s works show us not an either/or but a both/and. Both sets of mouths seem to belong to the same face, both sets of eyes fit the bird, the figure and her shadow are equally subjects in the painting. Unlike the reversible image which is fundamentally ambiguous, abiding by the logic of either/or, in Park’s paintings we find instead a productive ambivalence.