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Elli Chrysidou and Heejung Kim: The Power of the Gaze

From The Power of the Gaze, curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos, Heejung Kim, installation view, Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Elli Chrysidou and Heejung Kim
The Power of the Gaze
Paris Koh Fine Arts

Fort Lee, NJ
Curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos
March 6th to March 31, 2023

By MARK BLOCH, March 2023

In this exhibition, the curator juxtaposes the oeuvres of two established female artists to examine how the eye motif can be used to avert catastrophe and bring good fortune. “The gaze involves much more than seeing,” says Thalia Vrachopoulos. She cited “the western all-seeing ‘Eye of God’ in Christianity wherein the eye, like the stars, watches over humanity.” The CUNY professor then mentioned emblems “in ancient Greece painted on the prows of ships and in Egypt appearing as the eye of Horus.”

One of the two artists, the painter Elli Chrysidou, like the curator, Dr. Vrachopoulos, is of Greek heritage. Chrysidou lives there now and looks both forward and back in her practice. She paints single eyes that are the perceivers and recorders “of complex and contradictory worlds;” eyes that judge but that also see other eyes looking back at them.  Her eye is an experiencer, “the presence within the absence,” she called it. She hopes that working with this symbol then leads to understanding. She wants to find “what is hidden in darkness” by seeking freedom “through the alchemist’s position at the center of the world.”

Elli Chrysidou, acrylic on paper, 2023. Photo by Mark Bloch.

“I borrow elements - symbols, images,  from other eras,” Chrysidou told me. “William Blake said, ‘The eye is the black pebble in a raging sea.’”

Her imagery here ranges from blacks to burgundies, from pinks to dark and light reds. The eyes are situated within rectangles or occasionally a circle, looking left, right, up and down in a plane separate from its background. In one that almost disappears into ornamentation, a dark human figure with eyes closed faces off with a menacing serpent. They almost kiss. Elsewhere, single eyes are superimposed over a dark winged beast with a thick curly tail, a broad red tree, over repetitive plants and leaves, a red mountain or against clouds. Fifteen eyes in a matrix create a repetitive pattern of circles.

 

Elli Chrysidou, Optical Experience, acrylic on paper, 2023. Photo by Mark Bloch.

To my own naked eye, these images have the look of thick engraved intaglio lines cut into a copper or zinc plate to hold ink but a closer look reveals they are carefully painted brush strokes on paper, a combination of blotchy areas and hard edge lines, sensuously applied.  

I also spotted in Chrysidou’s enlarged eyes the possible familiar 1779 image of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Siffred Duplessis that knowingly peeks out at us from our money and that appeared on the earliest U.S. postage stamps beginning in 1847.

 

Elli Chrysidou, acrylic on paper, 2023. Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Her soft, warm brush strokes and colors deceptively ease into view powerful images such an alchemical winged dragon with a thick curly tail. This ouroboros emblem represents infinity—the swallowing of its own tail and feeding on its own body; the cycle of life.

This  particular symbol, one of the artist‘s most striking, was appropriated from a woodcut illustration from the “Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine,” an influential alchemical work published in 1602 by Johann Thölde that imparted twelve illustrated alchemical principles, including this third “key,” an allegorical description of how to create the philosopher's stone, an alchemical substance that turned base metals into gold. Centuries before Chrysidou, that treatise influenced Sir Isaac Newton and  Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry.

 

Elli Chrysidou, acrylic on paper, 2023. Photo by Mark Bloch.

Chrysidou studied Northern European Medieval history in Nancy and taught at the University of St. Etienne, both in  France. “Whereas Elli is from Greece, considered by many as the cradle of western culture,” said the curator, “Kim's Korean eastern origins may offer a different interpretation.”

The Korean artist Heejung Kim told me she intentionally uses “the shape of the eye” to bring objects to life. Watching plants fight for sunlight and space like humans but also like jungle animals, she told the story of a neighbor who was once cutting plants and how it left her wanting to personify them by adding an eye with the hope of preserving and protecting them.


Elli Chrysidou, (detail), acrylic on paper, 2023. Photo by Mark Bloch.

This story reminded me of white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda), known as “doll's eye” because black dots on its white berries make it look like a cluster of eyeballs on red stalks. It is loved by birds but poisonous to humans, causing immediate sedation to muscles.

Nevertheless, some years later, Heejung Kim is still drawing, painting, and carving iconic eyes in her 2D and 3D works. Kim's prolific career also spans the multi-media range from art-books to installation. “Her tondos demonstrate an ongoing commitment to the eye motif,” said the curator Vrachopoulos about some of Heejung’s other works.

Tiny clouds can often be seen passing in front of the corneas of Heejung’s artful eyes. One Sunday when she was a kid, after waking up early on a cold winter morning, she saw a tiny cloud passing by her second floor window. She used the cloud shape in her artwork and called it ‘Love.’”

“When you see it from far away, it looks like an eye. But closer, you will see a moon, a cloud, a sky, and land or ocean,” Kim said.

Paris Koh Fine Arts Gallery, Elli Chrysidou and Heejung Kim: The Power of the Gaze, Installation view, 2023. Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts.

There are three installations comprising her work in this show. A large array of canvas horsehead-like shoe forms, each containing an eye, cast shadows as they ascend and seem to march cross the wall. The blue, not the whites, of their eyes are a distinctive brand, as are the thinner-than-rope outlines that surround each almond shape. The individual shoes or feet are each layered with a network of canvas-colored rough hewn seams that delineate a single blue eyeball with subtle dark blue surrounding a black iris. Kim’s floating signature cloud shapes echo the chubby stitched edges that surround the eye in place of lashes.

Grouped on a nearby shelf, twenty wooden blocks present what look like twenty hooded round sculptural cartoonish heads on triangular necks. Each evokes a whimsical, sometimes phallic, Philip Guston-like figure.

 

Heejung Kim, Life as a Fragile Journey (detail), plastic eggs, fabric, acrylic paint, 2011. Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Finally, peeking and peering in every direction, about 300 baseball-sized bean-bag spheres form a tall skinny tower, plucked from the earth, heaven-bound, like a rock pile tree growing toward the sun. From a base at the bottom, they spread over the slab, spilling out as they rise. Stretching from floor to ceiling, not every one sports an eyeball watching its collective self climb into the sky.

Nunchi is the subtle Korean art of ascertaining the moods of others. It first appeared in the 17th century as nunch’ŭi, meaning eye force, eye power or eye measure. It involves looking and listening to gauge other people’s take on things to maintain harmony,  similar to the more Western concept of emotional intelligence. However, Vrachopoulos added, “her Korean heritage considers direct eye contact ill-mannered and uncivilized, especially when directed toward an elder,” citing Confucianism which commands unwavering respect. So in every time and culture, it has been advisable to pay special attention to the human eye.

 

Heejung Kim, Life as a Fragile Journey (in another location), plastic eggs, fabric, acrylic paint, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Parallels in modern art are also many. We have all seen Rene Magritte’s The False Mirror, the 1928 painting of an eye reflecting clouds, a simple Surrealistic masterpiece that expressed uncomplicated but mysterious truths.

Another Surrealist, Kurt Seligmann, was a Swiss-American member of the movement who was extremely influential for his vast knowledge of the occult and what he termed “magic.” His home library included not only alchemy but a number of classic books about the evil eye including Frederick Thomas Elworthy’s The Evil Eye: An Account of This Ancient and Widespread Superstition (1895), Robert Craig Maclagan’s The Evil Eye in the Western Highlands (1902), and Alexander Haggerty Krappe’s Balor with the Evil Eye: Studies in Celtic and French Literature (1927).*


 

Heejung Kim, Come And Go (installation view), shoes, fabric, acrylic paint, thread, 2009. Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts.

The theme of protection against evil forces via symbols and amulets was also reflected in an article Seligmann wrote entitled “The Evil Eye”  in the very first issue of the influential journal VVV, the Surrealist magazine published in New York City by David Hare, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and Max Ernst. VVV was published from that issue in June 1942, through 1944.

In it, Seligmann called the evil eye “one of the most feared magico-diabolic forces” that is attracted to beauty “because… the Latin word invidia – envy – describes its action: to look into the very interior of things. The evil eye produces poisonous emanations which penetrate into the victim’s body.” He went on to discuss  the Gorgon–a monster-figure in Greek mythology that converts onlookers to stone–which he called “the occidental prototype of the evil eye.” In particular, Seligmann emphasized the psychological attributes of the eye as a  protective symbol that helps deter evil forces, fear and disaster.


Heejung Kim, Come And Go (detail), shoes, fabric, acrylic paint, thread, 2009. Courtesy of Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Said the show’s organizer and curator Dr. Vrachopoulos, who has written extensively about the contemporary art of South Korea as well as in the West, “The function of the eye as motif is to be found in both eastern and western cultures as a symbol of watchtulness or as an apotropaic image” with the power to prevent evil or bad luck or conversely, bring good fortune–in a word, lucky. “The eye motif's meaning has consistently been associated with good luck and as protection against an evil glare,” Vrachopoulos concluded.

The two artists complemented each other and illuminated the theme as my eye meandered from Chrysidou's sharp two dimensional focus to the playful but unassailable physicality of Kim's work that disembogues into the room. This eye-catching atmosphere in Suechung Koh's warm Paris Koh Fine Arts Gallery in Fort Lee, New Jersey is worth a look. It is located literally just over the George Washington Bridge. WM

*I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Dr. Grazina Subelyte, associate curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at the The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice, Italy for her vast knowledge of Kurt Seligmann, a favorite artist of mine, and for her thesis: Subelytė, Gražina, 2021, ‘Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and Occultism,’ Doctor of Philosophy in the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

 

Mark Bloch


Mark Bloch is a writer, performer, videographer and multi-media artist living in Manhattan. In 1978, this native Ohioan founded the Post(al) Art Network a.k.a. PAN. NYU's Downtown Collection now houses an archive of many of Bloch's papers including a vast collection of mail art and related ephemera. For three decades Bloch has done performance art in the USA and internationally. In addition to his work as a writer and fine artist, he has also worked as a graphic designer for ABCNews.com, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and elsewhere. He can be reached at bloch.mark@gmail.com and PO Box 1500 NYC 10009.

 

 

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