To appreciate the significance of Egamy’s art better, it is a good exercise to think about the reasons why some people who are not familiar with subtlety and implication of Egamy’s art don’t find their liking at their first sight. In many cases, they are looking for some nice and neat artworks, but Egamy’s art doesn’t belong to that category. Egamy’s paintings, often titled “rainbow”, are not simply of brightly lit seven colors. In Egamy’s painting, you can’t find any streak of clean and pure paints. The colors are all nuanced.
If the colors were meant to be as colorful as a rainbow as the title may suggest, they are not a pretty rainbow at all. Yet, it is one of the most amazing experiences for me to realize, when I finally faced Egamy’s rainbow colors, that this colors may be the true representation of our rainbows. It is delicate colors that concede the inevitable stains of deterioration but preserving the sparks of the origin. Finally faced with Egamy’s rainbow, one may realize that, probably, we don’t want to be flattered by an illusion of the imaginary rainbow anymore.
Tom Morton, the art critique and curator of Etsu Egamy’s exhibition “Rainbow” in Seoul (2022. 9.1. – 2022. 10.8.), describes the extraordinariness of Egamy’s colors this way:
Etsu Egami’s use of translucent colour is by any measure remarkable, combining an insistence on the liquid substance of her pigments, and the way they respond to the graceful slashes and arcs of her brush, with a sense that she is painting not with oils, but with something closer to light. Her palette might best be described as a slightly grubby rainbow, as though that miraculous, sky-strafing natural phenomenon had fallen to Earth, and in the process become soiled, whilst still remaining thrillingly chromatic. …
If pathos is an important element in Etsu Egami’s paintings, then it is balanced, if not by utopian dreams and hopes, then by a modest, cautious optimism. She has related that while human connections are fraught with ‘distance and uncertainty’, recognizing that this is not a bug, but a feature, has allowed her to ‘vaguely see the rainbow in the gray area of communication’, and it is this we glimpse emerging in her most recent canvases.
The aesthetics of Egamy’s art represents the world where I and the other exist in perpetual communication. It is a world which is fraught with ‘distance and uncertainty’ but still contains the potential of connection to understand.
The extraordinary maturity of Egamy’s art is found not only in colors; it is also in forms. It is guaranteed that you cannot see a familiar and easily recognizable form in Egamy’s painting. It takes efforts to figure out the forms, and still, the form you have figured out may not be the same form intended by Egamy. Yet, there will be certain rudimentary communication established with Egamy. This is all designed.
The forms, in certain cases, can be visible with some efforts to figure them out. In other cases, the forms are very difficult to understand. Yet I feel obliged to say that her art is not purely abstract. In the context of her art, Egamy paints such form to be the concrete representation of an image on her mind, like a face of a person. Abstraction per se may not be her intention, yet the viewer must engage own faculty of imagination. For Egamy, this is a simulation of human communication with all its shortcomings and potentials, taking place through the medium of her painting. For her, art is experience.
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