Detail: Il Lee is a New York artist who for over 30 years has been exploring contemporary possibilities in drawing and painting in his chosen medium of ball point pen. In recent years his massing of looping, energetic lines have given way to more angular, more interrupted even more urgent, styles of mark making. His work is far-ranging. He has created massive monolithic forms on equally large canvases, as well as continually experimented in countless smaller drawings and with various grounds and integrations of line work and color. Lee’s rigorous approach allows the viewer to be sensitive to nuances created through the smallest of deliberate changes—a thicker line, a more compact swirl, a smoother ground.
As with other contemporary artists legitimately extending the possibilities for abstraction, an interest in a particular genre is left behind. Remaining are concrete issues—within a commitment to explore the ballpoint medium are the possibilities of infinite approaches, so the most fruitful limitations must be set; certain evocative moods can be created through manipulation of line and form but summoning these moods with intent can lead to a sentimental practice so a focus must be kept on expanding the potential of the medium and not on using a reductive selection of tricks. As a result, and perhaps counter-intuitively, as well as being concrete exercises in how a medium depicts light, line, and form, his works also capture the ineffable.
In exploring the language of modernism Lee has moved through minimalistic representation of line and form to a more abstracted language of kinetics. His progression is far from a retooling of modernist approaches and much more an exploration of timeless and contemporary concerns from within his own highly developed practice.
Il Lee has been the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art and solo exhibitions at major cultural institutions including the Queens Museum of Art and the Vilcek Foundation in New York.