Dark Thoughts: Jinny Yu Starts Where Painting Ends

“Painters,” philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes, “recapitulate the history of painting in their own way.”1 1  - Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 99. Jinny Yu sums up a particular history of painting. Her work references the multiple times in the twentieth century when painters questioned the boundaries of their medium by limiting their palettes to black. Yu is part of this artistic lineage bent on formalistic self-reflexive scrutiny but also challenges modern orthodoxies by re-thinking the use of material and space in the practice of painting. When re-conceptualizing the limits of art, following the example of theorist Jean-François Lyotard, a painter is in the position of a philosopher.2 2  - Jean-François Lyotard, “What is Postmodernism?” [originally published 1979]reproduced in Art in Theory: 1900 – 1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Blackwell: Oxford, 1996), 1014-5.

Yu’s 2011 exhibition at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery, titled Latest from New York, constitutes a painting environment. The black paintings hang on, stand against, or tilt away from the white walls, illuminated by a large window. The space of the gallery is intricately linked to the articulation of the paintings’ surfaces.