In the 17th century, the French court painter Charles Le Brun, convinced that everything that causes a passion in the soul has its reflection in some action of the body, attempted to establish, in the service of art, a catalog of universal passions reflected in faces. This work is part of a long tradition in art history of seeking the utmost expression in the face, such as the busts of the Greco-Roman era or Géricault’s «The Raft of the Medusa». Thus, it could be said that, with some distance, Ok Seungcheol (b. 1988) finds in Le Brun his most singular and classic artistic precedent. The work of the South Korean artist offers the viewer a series of dramatic expressions without more information than the gesture on the face itself. There are no names or narratives, only faces with dramatic expressions. The emotional archetypes of his faces (without identity) appeal to the subjective experiences of the observer, or perhaps to that collective unconscious of which Jung spoke. 

Ok Seungcheol’s work —between the digital and the analog, fiction and reality, appropriation and singularity, popular culture and art— questions the system of visual culture, consumption, and mass production of images today based on manga, extrapolating its aesthetics, with the violence and brutality that are inherent to it. Popular manga culture translated into another language—the language of contemporary art, in this case—produces something that becomes familiar while remaining strange, something intriguing. The artist (influenced by the use of angles and perspectives from cinema) stores images from the Internet, movies, anime, or memes, which he combines, edits, and transfers to supports typical of artistic tradition, such as canvas or sculpture. (Manga and cinema are much closer worlds than one might think: consider, for example, the recently departed Akira Toriyama, who created Dragon Ball influenced by martial arts movies). 

Ultimately, the artist creates new identities from existing images, which he deconstructs and analyzes. In this process of rematerialization—similar to the process of camouflage—of digital originals, the artist presents a series of pieces characterized by appropriation and repetition and, yet, paradoxically, with their own identity stemming from his subjective intervention and the new meanings he brings. Camouflage is precisely the title of Ok Seungcheol’s first solo exhibition in Spain, where the artist focuses on repetition and transformation, and nods to the colors of the terrestrial camouflage pattern in «Helmet». Transferring digitally edited images to canvas allows for a departure from the referent and restores a tangible function to painting. 

The production process of this post-digital art implies a renewal of materiality that constitutes a way of directing attention to what already exists in our environment, and it calls into question Benjamin’s logic—which has become commonplace—that repetition implies the decay of the aura by destroying the context of the original work, its «here and now». Thus, providing its own «here and now» to the copy—inscribing it in a new context—would give rise to a kind of return of the aura. The copy then becomes singular, and mass culture, which profaned the magical aura of the work and seemed to announce the dissolution of the concept of author, acquires its own status of originality through an aesthetic re-elaboration. Therefore, if the copy can transform into a new original, we must rethink the problems that Benjamin posed almost a century ago and discover Ok Seungcheol’s work, camouflaged as a copy, as a disturbing proposal of new tangibility and singularity.