As neither ‘image a’ nor ‘image b’ survived the explosion into ‘image c’ entirely, there remained a vibrant echo of their form from before. This transformation beckons a vital exercise of illusion—shuffling the deck, the stacking of visual matter, the proverbial transformation of meaning. The gravitational pull at the center of Son’s paintings, often featuring a central figure, bears witness to the interplay of this instability of meaning. At the edge of this, gravity permeates flickers of reality, stochastic and swirling. The central figures remain malformed and knotted with the edges of abstraction like the Non-Finito sculptures, unfinished and perma-affixed to their raw material block. In active formal dissipation, similar to the flickers of reality at the edges, the figures are transformed by a more profound and less intense force of gravity. Their unfinished quality serves as a gesture of de-emphasizing them as primary subjects, mitigating the separation between them and their surroundings while at the same time leaving room for the capacity of voyeuristic embodiment. In their malformation and distortion, the forms and figures appear in motion, animated by the gravitational pull at the center of the paintings.
text by Misael Oquendo
