Kim Buck

Kim Buck draws in a way that makes you think of Old Masters and writes like someone who's spent a lot of time with Modernists. Her charcoal drawings of figures and forces are such incredibly detailed representations that even up close it's hard to believe they're not photos, but their reality is an airbrushed, oneiric one that makes the images almost abstract and powerfully allusive.

Compositionally, the figures range in scale from tiny foetal curls in wombs of light in the Contingent pieces to bodies boxed into the picture, contorted and pushing at its bounds in the ‘Counterpoint' works and ‘Limits of the Possible' to, finally, creatures of mythological stature being born out of lightning or taking aim at the moon in the ‘Clash' works and ‘Eternal Return'. The viewer's perspective and sense of scale shifts constantly - the observer is external, denied subjective identification, with the emphasis on the technical construction of the work, positing its reality in terms of construction rather than result.  

The in and out, back and forth way of seeing that this set of drawings demands, and the sense of how much sheer effort and work and significance goes into producing something like this and into looking at it are elucidated by the artist in her statement, ‘On Sisyphean Certainty', as deriving from the philosophies of Nietzsche and Albert Camus and the experience of producing her work. Effort, weight, repetition and inevitability are the ideas at play here, constructing a fated eternity out of individual effort. (Sisyphus being the guy who has to roll a rock up a hill in Hades that it'll then fall down and he has to roll it up again etc etc, c.f. Ovid, Kafka, Xena: Warrior Princess and so on.)

There's something a bit fort-da game Freudian in all of this, too, with approach/retreat and body/world questions gesturing toward how we develop selfhood through our bodies, and what a struggle that is. It's also, with the confinement and repetition, it's density and the effort it entails for both creator and reader, a bit Beckettian. It's very good, basically, but it does requires some effort. Then again, as one is reminded, there's always eternity. Bethany Small