Born from intense heat and low oxygen, charcoal emerges through incomplete destruction to sustain new energy elsewhere. This tension is at the core of Lee Bae’s “Le noir en constellation,” which gathers works in homemade charcoal from the past two decades of the artist’s ongoing study into this material’s chromatic depths.
Black is often defined as the absence of light. Yet as one moves around the canvas-mounted works of “Issue du feu,” 2003, strips of charred wood glow with a predawn blue. In a follow-up series, “Issue du feu (white lines),” 2019, these abstract mosaics of fir and pine tree glitter under spotlights in a magically dark room, producing illusions of volume that alternately swell and recede into the irregularities of the wood. The black of “Untitled,” 2020, is planar and almost plastic, sealed under the matte finish of an acrylic layer, while the calligraphic forms of “Brushstrokes,” 2021, breathe spontaneity through a porous charcoal ink. By using his entire body to execute each gesture, Lee embeds the signifying potential of corporality into these imaginary characters. In Landscape sp-4, 2003, one finds a black so deep it seems capable of absorbing all sound. From far away, the contrast with a curved expanse of white gives the impression of standing on the edge of a cliff. Up close, the vertigo intensifies with a reversal of depth: The black is actually a thick slice of charcoal that towers over the canvas, breaking into powdery dust as the earth might crumble into the sea.
While the echo of ecological degradation is never far from these works—charcoal is, after all, the human replication of coal—they assume a meditative rather than an anxious stance on nature. Like the moon that rises each night a little differently, the artist’s practice returns to material and color time and again to observe his environment with a calm neutrality. Lee’s exploration of black is as controlled as it is contextualized, his quest as much aesthetic as it is spiritual.
