Vanilla Ice Cream with Mayo and Fondue on Top: Exploring a Baker’s “Molecular Painting”

 

 Sungah Serena Choo

 

 

Baking bread requires the full range of bodily senses: feeling the texture of the dough in the kneading process and sensing the right time to stop, or the sense of smell that we need to determine how far along the bread is by the aroma it gives off in the oven. Indeed, in the world of bakeries following exact recipes, the ability to detect things by scent is a prerequisite for skilled cooks—more so than the movements in the often quite intensive process or the visual ability to spot the color of bread at the precise moment it is ready. Before, I had found it interesting that in the baking world, as opposed to other cooking milieus, people refer to “formulas” rather than “recipes.” It is an aspect that shows how much weight is placed on the elements, and the prevailing attitude of taking apart the ingredients’ basic properties and weaving them together again in new ways. In that sense, Melody Park is a baker before she is a painter: with her unique experience of having worked as baker of bread and cakes in the past, she responds to the commonalities in both areas as she commits herself to pictorial exploration.

 

Melody Park’s paintings boast aspects that evoke both the painter and the researcher of cuisine—like an outdoor swimming pool on a hot summer day that is a bit warm at the surface but refreshingly cool underneath; silhouettes of objects; a mousse with white soybean foam on top; sweet yet tart lemon sorbet; or utterly incompatible flavors like mayonnaise and fondue. More so than the senses of vision, smell, and touch, what captures the eye are the big books of color thicknesses and the color chips on the small square canvases located all around her studio. Like recipe books, the volumes could be described as records for drawing colors and textures. Recognizing how each paint has its own viscosity and how the thickness of a color can vary with their different characteristics and concentrations, the artist records her individual experiments with the extents of cracking and preservation when they are dry. She focuses on exploring the characteristics of colors as they react to water, oil, and air—for instance, she often makes use of titanium white, which dries quite slowly in comparison with fast-drying cobalt blue. For her color recipes, she records the date by fixing sheets with film capturing images of each concentration and thickness; rather than the color itself, these are records of the researcher’s basic attitude and desire to create colors. As records of her past efforts to individually document the textures and forms produced from her color modulations, Melody Park’s drawing books adopt a similar approach to a baker, who starts with flour, egg yolks, and water and experiments with different doughs to find the optimal state.

 

 

These experiments with watery materiality are based on a process of imagining the transparency and the physical sensations as light filters through. There seems to be an element of spontaneity to the process as Park experiments intuitively with mixtures of thick and watery concentrations at different grades on a single canvas—yet through the proportions of her ingredients, she is precisely establishing the scope of the colors she is to use. In basic terms, mixtures with a higher percentage of turpentine relative to the paint are used to produce paintings with as thin a concentration as possible; Park applies the paint thinly on the canvas, allowing us to more closely glimpse the thicknesses and textures. Underlying this is the artist’s focus on the chemical reactions of her materials, with each color possessing different properties. For example, the “flatness” of painting is not a reference to the physical two-dimensionality of the medium, but something that allows for the coexistence of various perceptions (sight, touch, and so forth) in the person viewing the surface as they view the object from a single sensory perspective. At the same time, Park opts for an approach where she paints or applies materials to her canvas in quite thin and “watery” ways—rather than focusing on the painting’s mass or the surface as such—and then erases that material thickness so that it shows as little as possible. Approaching a pronounced primitive state through her layers of color and representations of texture, Park’s paintings still adhere closely to the conditions inextricably bound to painting as a medium, and the factors that ensure painting’s expressive potential and value. While she retains the two-dimensional surface that is an intrinsic part of painting, she adopts a perspective that views the inherent perceptions of the physical medium as a continuum bound to its object, emphasizing the particles of her materials through which she is able to realize more expressive possibilities on the canvas.

 

 

Ahead of her approach to the particles of paint, Melody Park’s color choices—cerulean, silver, white, reddish-violet, camellia red, and so forth—originate in the appointed forms chosen by people to present large volumes and areas of color in banal ways, as we see in everyday life. Her paintings call to mind pictorial landscapes in which colors have been applied to large forms that are structural, yet come across as flat. For example, these are things that she intuits in those curious moments where artificial and natural colors overlap, as in the structures and shapes of a swimming pool located near a beach, or a rooftop swimming pool that meets the vertical rise of the sky. This sense stems from the priority that Park assigns to color development as a way of summoning her memories of states of mind through her experiments with the chemical and physical particles of her materials. The realm of color creation and movements that involve particular tools and the human body is a process that unfolds in a similar way to kneading dough to achieve fermentation or a completely new recipe through combinations of ingredients with different properties—the artist’s approach to capturing the pictorial landscapes she is capable of envisioning. In this way, Melody Park’s sense for connecting textures and colors involves bringing out the technical expression best suited to the basic properties of her materials through the use of oil paints, charcoal, oil sticks, oil pastels, wax, pencil, and powders. For an example of this, we can look at her studio, which is different enough from those of other painters that it gives the impression of her approach to painting being akin to molecular gastronomy. Like the laboratory of a chemist or a culinary researcher, it boasts paints in solid and powder form rather than tubes; in addition to brushes, it includes painting tools in unfamiliar shapes for her various painting experiments, surrounded on all sides by the square canvases where she has tested her color textures.

 

Molecular gastronomy is an example of a fine-grained approach to cooking, which involves developing new flavors and textures by scientifically analyzing food textures and compositions and the cooking process. Fundamentally, the ingredients and cooking process are understood in terms of molecular elements; even as the cook focuses on changes in the processes of baking, boiling, and heating, their focus is on conveying the flavor and scent of the raw materials. This approach of analyzing ingredients scientifically—with the molecular arrangements that change with the temperature and cooking methods—involves viewing them as mixtures of chemical substances and “increasing the volume” of the flavor by reconfiguring the properties, tastes, scents, textures, and colors that one is ultimately attempting to shape. It is quite a similar process to the way in which Melody Park creates her paintings. The color textures, forms, and canvas compositions that we perceive in her painting work share similarities with the way tiny molecules come together to form all matter, including the paints and backdrop. In paintings such as A Pool of Sunlight (2022), How Are You (2022), and Ping-Pong-Ping-Pong (2022), she deliberately adds distortions to the visual properties, such as the sizes and distances among the shapes or the colors and movement. The colors and shapes—such as the inner and outer portions that emerge around the colors on her canvases—serve as a means of allowing the two states to continue within a single perspective. In particular, her canvases show an approach in which she paints in a similar fashion to applying makeup, or carefully swabbing something away with a small, rounded sponge on a stick. This appears to be a way of absorbing the color underneath the canvas while keeping it confined solely to the surface. Park employs a wide range of other basic approaches, including painting in thin, shallow lines reminiscent of drawing.

 

In these ways, Melody Park’s deconstruction- and recombination-based interpretation of abstract painting evokes images of molecular recipes in which ingredients are ground down to produce new dishes. Rather than the instinctual act of eating, her approach involves breaking down the most fundamental aspect of painting: creation. In that sense, it does not seem all that important “what” she is painting, what object she is concretely trying to express to the viewer. Focusing on chemical change with their explorations of materiality, Park’s paintings center on a creative approach where the results originate in the paints through which she explores concentrations and textures, while adhering to an approach of applying tools as she explores the original colors that can be inferred from nature. The themes that are frequently talked about in contemporary painting—including the “support,” “materials,” and “tools”—share a commonality in terms of explorations of the materiality through which painting is achieved. Where other artists consciously adopt a “post-painting” approach of focusing on the surface or the “liquidity” of perceiving objects through the screen, or of pursuing their material nature, Melody Park forgoes this contemporary reliance on digital images. Instead, she turns to her own memories and perceptions of experiences, creating canvases that capture the embodied sensory instincts they allow her to imagine. Distancing herself from the framework of painting and contemporary image-based conventions, she is less interested in discovering new forms than in immersing herself in the basic language of the painting medium. Hers is not a methodology of representation, but one of introducing contexts into the painting form to allow for the most sensual expression of actions inscribed in the body through her own unique experiences.