Yoo Hye-Sook breathes to the sound of a pencil that twists and turns on the canvas covered with a dense, matte black. No programme, no destination. The artist abandons herself to the gestures that place the pigments on the canvas. Each line is a presence. Each line carries hope and expectation. Today is, tomorrow will certainly be.   

The canvas becomes a wall. A vibration is created between the pigments on the surface and the darkness of the hollows, where the pencil does not penetrate. At first, you see almost nothing, you discern a glow, a slight halo perhaps, nuances of subtle tones. Then the senses awaken, they would like to grasp, to understand. Through contemplation, the perceptive capacities and the gaze sharpen and refine. In hundreds, even thousands of lines, Yoo Hye-Sook gently awakens a presence. A murmured form, a halo, a shadow, an opening: a genesis that the attentive eye perceives without managing to embrace it. Blues, greens, purples, greys – the light brings forth and grows in these captivating apparitions that never reveal all of their secrets. Oceans, celestial spaces, architectures? Yoo Hye-Sook envelops the viewer in a night-time cape where the beginning of the day is breaking. Led to yield to our intuitions, everything within us admits doubt. What will happen will happen.   

In a series of small drawings, Yoo Hye-Sook revisits the subject of the window or the frontal stage. The writing is graphic. Is the point of view from the inside to the outside? Or the other way around? The lines are long, rapidly sketched in assertive colours. 

Those who have experienced James Turell’s installations, where light without an identifiable source embodies the only reference point, will draw a parallel with Yoo Hye-Sook’s research. The artist does not know any of these places-spaces and the important thing is not so much their identity. Her non-intentional universe is an invitation to surrender, to absorption, to impregnation. Its materiality links us to a space beyond the image, beyond time, beyond being.