Woo Jung Ghil: Savouring Silence | Kearsey & Gold
There’s something quietly obsessive about Jessica Woo Jung Ghil’s paintings, several of which are currently on show at Kearsey & Gold. They’re not entirely abstract: each is a depopulated landscape, vaguely suggesting the sun, the moon, the sea, some hills, or some combination of these. Their calming colours drift and meld, though never randomly.
Probably their obsessive vibe comes from how they’re made. Ghil builds them through endless thin layers of oil paint. “I use a lot of gamsol or a dilutter,” she explains. “I try to dilute as much as possible so I have very thin layers. It makes a big difference. All these layers matter because I dilute them so much it eventually comes up.
“I constantly layer because I love the transparency. It has to look right for me… You just know what you want. I’m very sensitive to colour, and my mood affects the work.”
The mood cast by these works, at least for me, matches the title of the show. They seem made to be looked at in silence - and looked at closely. They’re not exactly beautiful. It’s obvious they took a lot of effort to make. All those layers! They’re silent, but it’s not a serene silence: it’s one accompanied by a furrowed brow, a tense hand, a need for it to “look right”.
And this looking-right is only relevant to what the artist thinks, according to Ghil at least. “I don’t really care for what people see in my painting, I’m just grateful they are even looking at it,” she says. While looking, I felt quite grateful too.
Woo Jung Ghil: Savouring Silence is at Kearsey & Gold (London). 04 February 2025 - 14 March 2025