XIAN KIM

Through her practice as a painter, Xian Kim reinterprets familiar creatures and objects, stripping them of all extraneous elements and investigating their deepest essence. Reconstructed on canvas with intriguing textures, using plastics or ceramics, the elements taken from everyday life are transformed into objective, spontaneous still lifes. Suspended in an idealized void – similar to a world with zero gravity – Kim’s subjects escape from the anxieties of the contemporary world to give rise to a peaceful, liberating visual utopia, where the emotional temperature gives way to silent contemplation.

The title of the show, Respite for this Afternoon, acts as a conceptual fulcrum for the entire project, and refers to that specific and suspended fraction of time typical of certain afternoons, especially in summer. It is that moment of transition when the light vibrates with dreamy intensity, and chronological time seems to loosen its grip on reality, rooted in the artist’s gaze. Crossing the threshold of this exhibition thus means entering an intimate, protected dimension.

The ‘powdered’ surfaces of Xian Kim’s canvases stage a microcosm made of small sculptures, jars and knick-knacks. Freed from their merely practical function, these objects become little domestic altars and secular nativity scenes. Far from becoming a pure naturalistic exercise, the artist’s works become an interregnum: bending and gently distorting physiognomies and forms, she triggers a new visual grammar. Echoing the metaphysical solitude of the great tradition of painting – capable of extracting the absolute from the quotidian – the works on view present themselves as celebrations of living, layered material. Every patch of colour is an exercise of presence, an invitation to slow our thoughts and to listen to the ‘sacred conversations’ the objects establish with each other.

As Gioele Melandri emphasises in the critical essay that accompanies the show: ‘In a world that seems to be shrinking, collapsing into itself and becoming increasingly frenetic and governed by performance, Xian Kim’s painting acts as a form of silent resistance, and this exhibition, as if it were a pause, urges us to suspend any form of preset judgment. [...] For Kim painting things, in the final analysis, means looking after them, raising them out of the dust of banality to reveal their most sophisticated intimacy. Respite for this Afternoon thus becomes a formal invitation to grant ourselves the luxury of a pause; to seek our own opening, our own trajectory, to get beyond what is obvious and to discover – in the partiality of a detail – that remnant of goodness that still exists, useful to avoid getting completely lost in the chaos of this world – or to get lost only as much as is necessary.’