By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO
Published: August 10, 2007 von The New York Times
The attraction for artists of the ballpoint pen has grown over the years, particularly in affectedly informal contemporary drawing.
But it is also being put to more ambitious uses. At the Queens Museum of Art a selection of Il Lee’s drawings — dramatic indigo and black ink abstractions, all done exclusively in ballpoint pen, on paper and canvas — can be seen in the mezzanine galleries. The drawings may not be great art, but they take doodling to a new level.
The works in this show, produced over the last few decades and including Mr. Lee’s largest piece to date, a 50-foot pen drawing on paper, are deceptively casual; a lot goes into each one.
His drawings on canvas are meticulously primed with five layers of acrylic mat gel, each layer spread evenly with a knife before he begins to draw. Surface is paramount, with the gel primer preventing the ink from encroaching on the canvas; instead, it pools into a smooth wash on the surface, gradually obliterating the pen strokes.
The process is different in the works on paper, which are not treated before he begins to draw. The heavy white paper stock retains an impression of each pen stroke, resulting in an incised, dappled surface texture. And of course the ink seeps into the paper and bonds with it. Sometimes Mr. Lee applies so many pen strokes over weeks and months that the layers of ink become encrusted and gritty.
Works on paper, less luminous than the canvases but with more tactile appeal, are the highlight of this show, chosen by the curator Joanna Kleinberg from different phases of Mr. Lee’s career. Mr. Lee has been making ballpoint pen drawings for 25 years; he began shortly after moving to the United States in the mid-1970s from his native Korea, where he was born in 1952. He went first to Los Angeles then to New York.
The show, with a dozen works and two dozen early experimental studies, begins with the 50-foot drawing. It took two and a half months and 400 to 500 ballpoint pens to complete, Mr. Lee working on sections at a time propped up against the wall in his Brooklyn studio. The installation is a sweeping, rhythmical abstraction in blue recalling the Italian Futurist paintings of Giacomo Balla, or elements of traditional Asian ink and wash painting.
What makes this work, and others like it, so alluring is its unexpected suggestiveness. When Mr. Lee’s drawings conjure before you a soft, densely inked snowflakelike blob with feathery edges, or a pattern that recalls a distant constellation, or foliage, or even stones in a pool of clear, shallow water, it is hard not to be mesmerized. The simple, minimal forms are instinctively seductive.
One painting, “BL-060” (2005), is pure graphic intensity. A large, horizontal, heavily inked abstraction, it suggests a mountain range, the ocean, a wide-open landscape and even a rain cloud — nature captured in abstract terms. From some angles you’d swear you could step right into the picture.
An installation of experimental sketches, some of which correspond to elements in the drawings, suggests Mr. Lee’s working method: He has an idea, jots it down on any surface available, from newspapers to notepads and sketchbooks, and sees if it works before he applies it to the larger scale. His images are too finely wrought, his forms too complex, to be left to chance.
That’s not to say these drawings cannot be appreciated as abstractions alone. In various images he manages to convey a sense of alternating light and space, even movement — especially as shadows and slivers of natural light from nearby windows rake across the ink.
“Il Lee: Ballpoint Drawings,” Queens Museum of Art
Works:
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