In Nature’s temple, living pillars rise,
Speaking sometimes in words of abstruse sense;
Man walks through woods of symbols, dark and dense,
Which gaze at him with fond familiar eyes.
Like distant echoes blent in the beyond
In unity, in a deep darksome way,
Vast as black night and vast as splendent day,
Perfumes and sounds and colors correspond.

—from Charles Baudelaire’s Correspondances, translated by Jacques LeClercq

Hanna Hur’s paintings and drawings abound with logics: of geometry inherent to the making of a picture, of boundaries and thresholds, of transparency and color. All these logics create a world of Hur’s own, although the idea of a complete narrative is eschewed in favor of a calmly dizzying effect on the mind and the body.

Grids organize space: on an empty expanse they delimitate zones, impose a structure. Boundaries are traced and disrupted by other frontiers. Thresholds are malleable. In Signal iii, a yellow grid grips and tightens the space while sky-grey lines radiating outward from the center hint at another dimension. The eye moves back and forth between geometric designs on the surface of the picture plane and a stormy background of graphite clouds: order and chaos, coming together and existing on the same spectrum.

The celestial tones: pale, translucent, or of a black void, create a feeling of the Eternal. This Eternal is not an immutable cliché of heaven: it’s an endless space of mystery that keeps repeating itself, in which nothing is static. Like a hologram, showing its superimposed images in oscillating unison, one sees everything and nothing. Transparency, meanwhile, undoes as much as it does.

Which side of the gate are we on? Focal points become energy points that pull us in like magnets. However, the trajectories are uncertain; movements could reverse course in the blink of an eye.

In Moonbather iii, by including the stretcher bars in the composition which is painted and drawn on silk, Hur acknowledges the material realities that hold the picture plane in place. The work calmly balances painting and sculpture. The geometric logic both traps and comforts the evanescent figures, which appear eternally suspended.

The moment you think a pattern becomes clear, another one emerges. The eye, a spiritual seeker, searches for a logic that permeates all elements. This quest replaces the idea of Truth: the demanding process is itself fulfilling. We delight in foldings and unfoldings of the inner mind made visible.

Hanna Hur (b. 1985, Toronto) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2019 and holds a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal. She has exhibited at u’s, Calgary; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Franz Kaka, Toronto; L’inconnue, Montreal; Motel Gallery, New York; Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles; The Sunroom, Richmond; Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; and Shanaynay, Paris. Her work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Canadian Art magazine.

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