"I like dynamic compositions," Leo Park told me last year in an interview on Juxtapoz.com. "I like dance and choreography, and the thrill of a body playing around with its own limitations." That is the place to start with Park's work, as he the viewer has a bit of a dance of recognition in each canvas, a bit of sorting out where the limbs and the faces and body parts all match up and how the maze of abstraction and familiarity join. You see a figure, but it's almost a manifestation of movement. And it being summer themed, as is his new solo show Big Fat Summer, on view at The Hole in NYC, the body is bare and the backgrounds that of the Swedish countryside and the angles almost more jarring than ever.
As the gallery notes about the classic compositions that Park is influenced by, the nude in landscape, "Park’s latest body of work is a postcard from the Scandinavian countryside, an invitation to indulge and a deliciously decadent exploration of desire." It's both desire and almost a sense of absolute audacity. Nudes in the countryside as a concept is almost obscene in its audacity, and yet here we are, with some of Park's best works to date in ode to a classic art form. Also in the vein of Hilo Chen, who took the summer theme and the nude body in landscape to hyperrealistic heights, Park is experimenting with an opposite effect of how far he can tangle the body until you can't quite fathom what are seeing. —Evan Pricco
