Chae Sung-Pil teaches me a hitherto unsuspected nature of painting: its capacity to fix a moment and all that it carries of importance. Sung-Pil's art was born from such a moment. Accidental according to him, but of which he has nevertheless had and since then, the right intuition of the gravity. The one that requires that we hold it and apply ourselves to painting it. The one that justifies that we contemplate it with our own eyes.

The visual force of Sung-Pil's works lies in a rigorous and precious technique. It combines a simplicity of form and a delicate work on the material. I know all the importance that the painter gives to the choice of his pigments, binders and supports of his works. A real work of painting even before laying the first "touch". The result is a total plastic beauty. Color, light and material are thus intimately linked by their aesthetic perfection.

This is not however an end in itself. This beauty carries a deep soul. That of the Tao and the intrinsic meaning of objects and "matter". There is no doubt that the use of natural substances, coming from the sea and the soil, from Korea itself, is not an artifice for Sung-Pil. It is the sine qua non condition for the authenticity of his work. There is here a full Fusion between matter and movement, between body and mind.

The pictorial material then becomes a "sensitive" support. Sung-Pil's gesture captures the inspiration carried by the moment: the breath of the wind, the powerful wave, and both the tiny tremors of animated nature, and the jolts of telluric forces. Chae Sung-Pil's work captures like no other, the so important "punctum".

She embraces it all the better because she does not keep only the visual form - the punctum is therefore not the prerogative of photography in Art. In painting, and in the gesture that “implements” it, the sensitive phenomena are also preserved: movements and vibrations, even sounds perhaps, those that inspired the painter and that touch us now.

We find in Sung-Pil’s painting, in the very material, the naturalistic mimicry that Zeuxis sought to achieve. But in a more subtle turn that has nothing to do with the vain ambition to compete with Nature. Sung-Pil’s gesture, in the application of the material, is of a delicacy and a gentleness that moves more than the impetuous ardor of action painting. Leaving room for a part of chance is here of great maturity. It is the extra strength. It imposes itself without grandiloquence, without the trivial exaggeration of all over. The reserve of the painter, the reserves of the painting on the canvas, are a grace.

It is remarkable that under an apparent simplicity, under the trappings of abstraction - sometimes misleading since figuration is considered of lesser value - Sung-Pil this time brings to fruition the quest that all horizons and pictorial, cultural and temporal currents have led without often achieving it. Minimalism takes on its full meaning, that of a humility that has everything to give.

We have here, with Chae Sung-Pil, the immense chance to contemplate an integral art. In the sense that it produces, on us spectators, the entirety of the emotional, sensory and spiritual experience that the painter calls us to live. Thus, Sung-pil taught me with accuracy the true nature of painting: the art of fixing the moment and giving back all the sensations that make it valuable as an experience and poetry.

Arnaud Pagnier
Magna Gallery Paris