(First draft) Shim Moon-Seup A Certain Scenery Solo Show

Perrotin Gallery, New York | February 28 – April 12, 2025

In A Certain Scenery, Shim Moon-Seup presents a suite of seascape-inspired paintings that hover between recollection and repetition. The exhibition, composed largely of works from his ongoing series The Presentation and Re-Present, cultivates a space of durational looking, at times compelling, at others perhaps overly subdued.

Each canvas is structured through horizontal bands of acrylic, rendered in restrained palettes of blue, gray, and black. In The Presentation (2022), the delicate tonal gradations mirror the slow rise and fall of ocean swells, while other compositions verge on the monochromatic, evoking nightfall or visual disappearance. Depending on the viewer’s disposition, the repetition can feel contemplative, or verge on monotony.

Shim’s background as a sculptor informs his approach to the surface. There is a density to the brushwork, a sense of paint accumulating like sediment or dragging across resistance. This materiality hints at transformation, though it occasionally feels tethered to the conceptual weight of his medium shift. Without the contextual anchor of his sculptural past, the paintings risk becoming formally elegant but effectively distant.

Ultimately, the exhibition is less concerned with depiction than with presence. Shim offers not an image of the sea, but its rhythm, insistent, measured, and unresolved. It is an atmosphere more felt than defined, one that hovers on the edge of stillness and returns the gaze with quiet persistence.