Black Forest: 박이도
Remembering the “Black Forest” That Was Not Black – On the occasion of Ido Park’s solo exhibition.
Text by Inseon Kim
Translated by Gallery Chosun
While working on landscape painting for his solo exhibition at Gallery Chosun in July 2022, Ido Park recalled the powerful impressions he once felt in the “Black Forest”. The exhibition title refers to Schwarzwald, a mountain range east of the Rhine in Germany. Park first encountered the Black Forest in 2010, after studying in Dijon, France, and later moving to a school in the Strasbourg area. He often walked there and spent time in the forest.
For the works shown in this exhibition, Park returned to outdoor sketching. On canvases carried into the landscape, he called up sensations from more than ten years ago and layered traces of those memories into present-day scenes. As he shifts slightly away from his earlier practice and takes on the new category of landscape, it is helpful to look back at the path of his previous work in order to understand the direction of his current paintings.
do Park has long focused on the ‘depiction’ of objects. By applying crafted textures to a surface, he creates a kind of illusion and heightens visual effect. For this reason, his surfaces are not limited to canvas. Paper and canvas, as well as plywood, plaster, glass, ceramics, sculptural forms, and everyday objects, have all served as supports for paint. This can be seen in the range of works he has shown since returning to Korea after studying abroad.
《Human Pattern》, produced from 2013 and presented in 2015, is based on people around him. The series consists of small square plaster panels painted with side-profile silhouettes of his models and installed in ordered rows. Rather than portraying the figure directly, he used the space formed by placing mirrored profiles side by side. By considering each person’s job, character, and traits, he rendered them as carefully depicted stone or wooden pillars with distinct patterns and textures, expanding the idea of portraiture.
In 2017, the 《괴석 도》 series introduced visual textures that confuse perception of what is real. These works appear to depict unusual rocks, but in fact show hardened wood, overlaying visual doubt onto the subject itself. Park’s strong descriptive skill is also clear in a series released in 2016, where painterly illusion turns everyday objects into solid marble or wood, offering an alchemical fantasy that heightens a sense of play. These strategies of close, detailed depiction; meant to overturn perception, are the result of the artist’s persistent and careful observation.
In a recent interview, Ido Park shared the sketchbooks he has filled over many years. The notebooks he carried while travelling were packed with spontaneous drawings. Rather than following fixed themes or subjects, he drew images that came to mind; memories, imagined scenes, or things he noticed in front of him. His drawings are made of clean lines with even pressure, sometimes long or short straight lines, sometimes curves. Intersecting lines form mesh-like surfaces that suggest planes and volume. At other times, smooth curves simplify the subject while remaining precise. The lines are restrained, neither overstretched nor vaguely sketched. Even accidental drips or smudges of paint became starting points for freely developed images.
These drawings recall the 《외강내유》 series he has been producing since 2021. In that body of work, plants such as flowers and leaves are painted over photo collages, rendered with such realism that the boundary between photograph and painting becomes unclear. Here too, one can sense the process of close, careful observation. This tendency has shifted and deepened recently as he began to engage seriously with landscape painting.
When visiting Ido Park’s studio, one finds many plants of different sizes and types, with leaves that are wide, thick, thin, or delicate. The artist tends to them with care, and the plants respond faithfully to proper temperature, moisture, and light. With their varied forms, they often become subjects for his drawings and detailed paintings.
Plants grow by adapting to their environment, leaving traces that are both organic and geometric, forming steady, repeated patterns. Seen this way, Ido Park’s line seems well suited to close observation of plants. It is a trained line that keeps a steady direction and thickness, senses changes caused by the environment, and follows the regular cycles of plant life. Over time, as he cultivated and observed these plants, they taught him different ways to move the brush, to handle long and short lines, and to respond to the colours and forms that emerge. More importantly, they revealed an instinctive flexibility; shown in growth speed and in the shapes of leaves and stems; that allows life to continue in response to changing conditions.
His recent landscapes show many different qualities, much like the plants he grows. A distant view of a landscape cannot easily be captured with the methods he used before. Objects that once appeared as separate forms are now absorbed into the whole canvas, moving within shifting fields of colour. Some canvases are built on spreading washes of colour. Others fill the surface with repeated thin, long brushstrokes. In some works, irregular lines follow the free reach of tree branches. In others, bright colours scatter across the surface like flowers in full bloom.
This exhibition, 《Black Forest》, feels important for Ido Park because it reveals his desire to move beyond earlier formats and change his approach. The subjects he once examined closely are now placed at a much greater distance. This widened gap between artist and subject appears on the canvas as forms that blend seep into one another, and become entangled.
In his work notes, he records sensations recalled through memories of people close to him: his father and the landscape rushing past a car window, a scene his mother taught him to see with eyes closed, shared notes with his accordion teacher, books with his older brother, and the glowing face of his daughter. In the case of the memory with his mother, wax is applied to wood to form abstract images. Wax, paint, and pencil are rubbed, layered, and repeated, as if physically bringing past memories into being through texture.
The rough, uneven surfaces formed in this way paradoxically allow soft colour gradients to spread and settle across the image. The titles of the works refer to subjective sensations; words drawn from both the visible colours left on the surface and the personal memories that shaped them.
An accordion sat in the corner of Ido Park’s studio. For a moment, it became an impromptu concert. He said he had not played for a long time, yet the music that emerged was fluent and deeply nostalgic. His fingers moved across the complex keys with motions shaped by long practice, releasing melodies his body still remembered. With his eyes closed, he found each note by touch alone, blending rhythm and airflow to produce a full, resonant sound.
His paintings resemble the process of learning and playing the accordion, and even its tone. As mentioned earlier, his landscapes allow memories and layered sensations to enter between observation and depiction. In this sense, landscape becomes a fitting subject through which he can loosen himself from the strict descriptive methods he once pursued.
The autumn of the Black Forest he encountered in France was carried by dry winds, the scent of fallen leaves, and the soft rustle of the woods. Its summer was dense with lively greens, filled with air that was both hot and humid. These experiences cannot be conveyed through visual description alone. To translate the forest’s changing moods and sensations, his once measured and precise depiction began to push beyond its boundaries, freeing itself into gestures that move with his humming body. His canvases have grown bolder, lines surge and scatter, press forward quickly, stretch outward, then vanish or break unexpectedly. They evoke moments of calm and stillness, at times damp darkness, at others a cool, refreshing breeze. These attempts reach beyond sight alone, engaging multiple senses and inviting viewers to breathe in many kinds of air within the exhibition space.