Hosted by 193 Gallery for his first solo exhibition in Paris, the South Korean painter Hyangmok Baik explores the throes of love in a series of inhabited canvases.
Naked, muscular, floating in a vaguely abstract world marked by the presence of animals: white swans in black cats, snakes in doves and unicorns, which inhabit each of his canvases, the men painted by Korean artist Hyangmok Baik evoke a troubled and disturbing male archetype. As if lost in a paradise found again, confronted with the question of desire, with the laws of attraction disturbed by the desire of other men; would it then still be a paradise? The strength of the male bodies represented seems to be diluted in an ocean of questions, like the title of the exhibition proposed by 193 Gallery, Have You Ever Fallen in Love? Of this question, the artist makes work, by deploying about twenty mysterious and colored paintings, without answers, but all crossed by a tension between desire and forbidden, virility and fragility, heaven and earth, humanity and animality, body and soul
