LEO PARK: BEYOND PLEASURE
Carl Kostyál announces BEYOND PLEASURE by Swedish artist Leo Park. The laid-out perspective and depth can only be articulated through painting and couldn’t be realized in three-dimensional space or captured in a photograph.
April 26 - May 25, 2024
Sigmund Freud’s pain-pleasure principle suggests that our choices are conditioned by an effort to either avoid or decrease pain or to create or increase pleasure. In that regard, our skin and skeleton protect us from external pain, but our psyche doesn’t have a comparable shield for libidinal excitation. This is why, Freud claims, our instinct, libido, or life-drive, Eros, is in constant conflict with the death-drive, Thanatos.
The historic prominence of these tropes allowed Park to enter ongoing conversations and propose new ways to diversify them. Interested in developing his painterly language and focusing on the abstract qualities of the body, he developed peculiar tattooed crosses between figures and sculptures. By envisioning something that can be described as corpoabstraction or synthetic humanity, the Swedish artist is putting together a tongue-in-cheek homage to the tradition of the carnal subject matter.
Park’s process begins with quick, decisive, impulsive drawing through which endless variations on the nude form are developed. Presented in a large cluster covering a whole section of the gallery space, these visual musings distill the raw creative energy through direct mark-making. From there, he takes a more conscious and purposeful approach where the sense of volume and depth is established through light play reminiscent of Anders Zorn’s portraiture and his infamous tonal ranges. By allowing the instinct and the reason to cooperate in such a manner, the visuals are removed from reality into the realm of painterly ubiquity and further toward the absurd and grotesque (3 copy, 2024).
Barely fitting into the format of the canvas, they’re ornated with a fragmented mix of ancient and contemporary flat signs that function very differently than the painted, three-dimensional form on which they’re applied. By schematically adding them to the surface of the abstracted figure, this invented lexicon of symbols creates a visual break and interrupts them from looking like a clear continuation of established Modernist approaches.
Park is merely mimicking the appearance of simple signs inspired by comics, graffiti, runes, ancient inscriptions, hieroglyphs, petroglyphs, logotypes, and any other flat, two-dimensional language. And while the original idea was to make them appear contemporary and up-to-date, the use of these plane marks pulled them further into an ancient past, creating a temporal ambiguity around them.
A similar concept is used for the central motif, its tattoo-like embellishments, or how the elements of the natural surroundings are rendered, with Hirst or Pointillism-like spots depicting sand grains in an almost Pop Art-like way, for example. In the end, every aspect of the image is merely reminiscent of what’s represented rather than being a concrete depiction of it. This gives the work a contemporary twist, clashing the unpredictable, fleshy Cubist designs against the dots of solid pastel colors and a Neo-expressionistic, emotional, and expressive way of defining the dominant forms.