INTERVIEW
by Henri-François Debailleux

How do these black shapes that dominate your paintings come about?
When I get into the studio in the morning I have no idea what I’m going to draw, I have no precise subject in mind – indeed at that moment my aim is not even to find an image. My work is primarily an attitude, and it is this attitude that will generate forms.

So, I make a calm start with a brush and Indian ink and I draw on sheets of paper. I don’t know what shape is going to come out of me, out of my head and my body, and of course, the result is different every day, in keeping with the various internal and external elements, be it my mood or the weather outside. The work process has to do with memory, rather as if I were writing notebooks.

In this way, every morning I do about twenty or thirty drawings. Then I take a look at them and I choose the one I like. I never make figurative images because the forms are essentially reflections of my mind, of my sensibility, of my body, and of the way all those things work together. My approach isn’t a theoretical one, therefore, it is more the consequence of my own culture, of my education, of my childhood, of my experience, of what is happening on the day – in a word, of my life. That is why, to repeat myself, the form comes from an attitude.

Why do you repeat the chosen form so often on paper before you actually paint it on canvas?
Because I want each form to be precisely that, the result of the work of memory, the memory of my hand with the brush, the ink and the paper. To achieve that, you have to repeat the same form many times. I often say that this way of working is fairly close to that of pianists, who play primarily with their fingers. That doesn’t mean that they don’t play with their head, but it’s a mixture of the two and it’s often the hand that starts, the hand that has fully memorised the score. In the same way, I often make a brush mark and realise that it’s my hand which knows the form by heart from having repeated it so often. As if my hand was running ahead of my head.

Not long ago, when asked if he might one day venture into colour, Lee Bae replied that he was beginning to think about it and that he had even put out tins of coloured paint in his studio so that he could get used to them and to the previously inconceivable idea of painting with them. Since then, he has made that move, risking the use of red and brown. A real revolution. But only in appearance. For, as Lee Bae reminds us, black contains all the other colours, and therefore to work with any of these is still, at least in part, a way of putting black to work.

What is the origin of your love of black, which you’ve been working with ever since you started?
First of all, black contains all the other colours. That makes it a kind of matrix, and therefore a generating colour.

Also, I have nearly always worked with charcoal, which means black. And charcoal comes from fire. In theory it never dies and therefore it too is potentially a generator of energy. Charcoal is indeed the last thing left when all the other materials are dead, burnt. It remains essential. When everything has gone, the purity of its substance remains. This aspect has always made me think of Suprematism, of Malevich. When I look at one of his paintings, I am looking at an image of purity, of crystallisation.

Finally, charcoal is linked to my culture. In Korean tradition, when one was digging the foundations of a house, charcoal was the first thing one had to hand, in particular as protection against dampness, and insects. In the same way, when a child was born this was signalled by a piece of charcoal hanging from a rope on the door.

Asian culture likes to master the spirit and sets great store by spirituality. Now, black is the expression of that; it is writing, calligraphy. At the same time it’s a culture that leaves room for the intuition. In the same way, I always try to combine these aspects, the mental and the sensible, lucidity and intuition. And black enables you to do that.

Yes, I wanted to ask: what is your relation to calligraphy?
None. I don’t think about it and I never refer to it in my paintings. My way of painting has more to do with a kind of performance. Indeed, when I work with a brush and with my body I am working with time. That’s what’s most important. Gesture means time. Since I can’t retouch, and don’t go back, since I go over the work only once at each stage of the making process, it’s like a way of keeping time, of suspending a moment in the space of the canvas. Now, for me the best way of preserving that instant is to inscribe and immobilise my forms in a space that has the appearance of wax. But since nowadays there are more modern materials than paraffin, I use acrylic medium, which produces the same effect and the same meaning. So, as I said earlier, chance plays a considerable role in the initial appearance of my forms. Sometimes, too, some of them are reminiscent of calligraphy, or suggest a sign. But that is absolutely not intentional and it’s never a sign that you can identify, with a specific meaning.

Yes, in the past the ground of your canvases was the colour of wax. For a while now, these grounds have been very white. Where did this development come from?
I wanted to underscore and bring out the black form, to heighten its density so that it would give the impression of being even more suspended in space. To do that, I needed to heighten the contrasts and therefore go from the cream colour of the wax to a more emphatic white.

At the same time, and this is not paradoxical, I wanted to get more lightness, more fluidity in my black forms, which is something you can do with white, whereas the cream colour tends to frame things and squeeze them. The contrast between the form and ground is stronger now. Their coming together and their frontier create a new vibration and the reflection of the black on the white gives the black even more depth.

For that’s what’s important to me in this idea of contrast: giving the black as much density as possible, giving the black body, because black is my subject here.