Raymond Lemstra Exhibition

I met up with one of my friends who I met in college, back in Chicago. We have been in contact ever since I have returned to Korea, and we connect pretty well in terms of art. I invited him to check out an exhibit by an artist called Raymond Lemstra. I recognized the artists work because I used to follow him on Instagram. 

The actual work that was exhibited was stuff that I was not familiar with because I was used to seeing the artists drawings. I had no idea that he was doing paintings as well. The artist has a pretty tight drawing style, and that personality really shows through his perfectly designed paintings, that almost look like digital three dimensional renders. The portraits were cute despite their metallic cranial forms because of their facial expressions, where their eyes, nose and mouth are closely bunched together. Some of the facial expressions were more stoic and robotic, leaving a sense of possible danger. 

While I was going through this exhibit I kind of built my own story about the portraits. it made me think about a world where there are happy robots, serving us humans. Then one day they are no long happy being servants of mankind, and their more rebellious, dangerous, sentient side starts to show. Then further down the road, where the work becomes more abstract, and gritty, it seems like the robots seem happier, less metallic. Natural elements like news papers and paper seems to be stuck on their skins, as if they have gained new knowledge and acceptance, but we know not of what happened to the humans. At least this is the kind of story that I was thinking about. For some reason I really like Dystopian tales about robots taking over the world. This influence may also come from the media from materials such as 'The Terminator' or more recently 'Detroit: Become Human'.   

The exhibit was located in a nice underground cafe, and the interior was nicely decorated with a modern touch. It seemed to prefer the cold whiteness that modern galleries seem to prefer, a Le Corbusier type hyper clean space. To top it off they had some interesting looking, artsy toys displayed behind some glass cases.