Ugo Rondinone, black and green nun, 2020 Photo by Stefan Altenburger

The nuns + monks sculptures express in turn this dialectic from within and without. From opening up onto the world and from turning inward on oneself. From an introspective gaze combined with an exteriority receptive to nature’s elements of which these sculptures bear the traces. The imprint. Rondinone’s works have never stopped oscillating between extremes, entangling, suspending them. Aufheben…. The sculptures of nuns + monks possess a natural beauty. An “archaic” beauty that evokes other sculptural ensembles by the artist: Human Nature on Rockefeller Plaza in 2013 and Seven Magic Mountains in the Nevada desert in 2016. They manifest visibility yet at the same time seem to avoid the gaze of those to whom they are shown. Their features are indistinct. And in this era of multiple gender identities, they are divested of sexual characteristics, even though their titles allow us to differentiate them. It would certainly be extremely difficult to distinguish the nuns from the monks based on their mere appearance. Wrapped and protected in their cloaks, they seem, like his 1995 self- portrait and the ensuing clowns and nudes, absorbed, in the same way that Diderot characterized the figures depicted in certain paintings by Chardin. Absorbed in what? In whom? In the spectators wandering around them? In the architectural space that serves as the backdrop for their paradoxically motionless choreography? Unless, as is extremely likely, the space in question is mental. Meditative. Transcending the matter that still seems to determine their heft. Or, more than transcended, one could say the matter in nuns + monks is transfigured, revealing a radiance reinforced by the chromatic contrasts, the harmony generated by the juxtaposition of different body parts—the head and the cloak—and by the sculptures, perfectly integrated from one to the next, the abovementioned radiance evoking medieval statuary serving the same religious and spiritual purpose to which the artist is deeply committed. It should be explained that the creation of these works was nourished by Rondinone’s assiduous frequentation of the medieval sculpture department at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and in addition by a powerful confrontation with Giacomo Manzù’s cardinals, whose own particular modernity, permeated by a classicism that defies time and categorization, inevitably corresponded to his interest.

Between matter and its negation, these sculptures invest a polarized field. Amphibological. Made in bronze, they were conceived from limestone models, scans of which were “three-dimensionalized” with digital tools. In response to the friable limestone, the solidity of the bronze. In response to the stone’s natural, ancient origins, the here and now contemporaneity of the polychrome castings. Of course, we must, as is often the case in Rondinone’s work, seek the response, ineluctably unstable, inherent in his propositions in the interpenetration
of the extremes and intervals they bring about. In a game of equivalences. Opening up onto the world, to nature, and turning inward on oneself. In matter that is as embodied as it is disembodied. And given its elevated spiritual coefficient, so remarkable these days and, in a manner of speaking, absent from contemporary art, in an anagogical principle that re-transcribes and accompanies the process of transfiguration underlying this group of sculptures.

Erik Verhagen
Translated from French by Laurie Hurwitz

On the one hand, it refers to our current shared experience of the protective measures to combat Covid-19: lockdown at home and/or the closing of borders. Without a spatial, geographical “somewhere else”, the distant has become a nostalgic dream for many and can even become bound up with the hope for a better (albeit utopian) life.

On the other hand, distance in a temporal sense is a central element in Luo’s Mingjun work. The artist has lived in Switzerland since 1987 and, in her search for her own identity, she links her Chinese origins with her European present. However, her relationship to her roots proves to be something distant, vague, like faded images rising out of her memory. When she emigrated, the artist had incidentally also lost her Chinese citizenship on account of Chinese legislation.

These two facets of the distant shine permeate the exhibited works.

In a very large-format picture, Mingjun Luo has taken up a theme she has already dealt with in her work: the magnolia, a tree in her garden which she can see from her studio window. However, she has brought the customarily empty background to life with an ethereal, imaginary atmosphere of the distant. This distance is like an echo from a “somewhere else” that is currently unreachable.

The magnolia itself is additionally a part of the artist’s search for identity. Not only does the tree accompany her in her current everyday life: it is also of Asian origin, as she discovered by chance. She pursues her search for identity in the heart of the form of her artistic expression, which she uses to link her present with her past. In this context she has adopted the technique of Western oil painting, but she nonetheless employs it in keeping with certain principles of Far Eastern ink painting: in her oil painting she generally limits herself to grey tones, playing with light and shadow, abundance and emptiness – the empty canvas is active and appears in the form of the strongest shadow.

In two small paintings, the magnolia becomes a pure network of twigs and dabs of light, a response to the tracery of a screened window that emerges in dark on light, lit from behind. This type of window was common in Ancient China as well as other cultures. It made it possible to see out without being seen. At that time, it pointed to a feeling of simultaneous security and danger, just like that unleashed by the Covid-19 lockdown today.

Among many other works, the misty-airy image of an airport conjures up a journey to a distant land. The barely identifiable contours of the aeroplanes and the strange light somewhere between day and night are shrouded in secrecy. A secret that permeates many of Luo’s Mingjun works. It can also be found in the watercolour of a series: the artist uses dabs – goutelettes d’eau (drops of water), as the title says – to suggest a few fleeting traces of her origins with the help of an old family photo.

In these hints between presence and absence, Mingjun Luo leaves her works open to her viewers’ fantasy. She interprets the meaning of the signs in her way, something, almost nothing, which is anchored in the Chinese tradition. The entirety of her art, by the way, pursues the secret and an opening. This is also shown by how she selects the details for her images – the magnolia of which she has recorded only fragments, a single cloud on an empty canvas – or, above all, the interplay she creates between abundance and emptiness, light and shadow, the material of the colour and the empty canvas.

Unlike the approach adopted in her earlier work based on socially imagery content, Zhang Zipiao’s paintings in the last years return to the actual taste of life as the impetus of her practice. Through amassing everyday experiences and paying attention to the subtle feminine sensibilities and translating these clashes, contradictions, and contentions between the flesh and the mind onto the canvas.

The Position series, which began in 2019, is an expressionistic portrayal of the typical female body, a motif found throughout the history of art. The artist’s personal and everyday approach distinguishes from the female figures in the history of art – where only the female body is opaquely left on canvas, her audacious brushwork challenges and responds to the objectification of the female body. As this series develops, the gender specificity of these bodies becomes indistinguishable or even abandoned, and the body becomes pure and swarming flesh. (i.e., Melting 2, Meat Mate 2, etc).

Hereon, all of these works on canvas about the body and mind in the general sense have given the flesh the possibility to be fluid through the artist’s detailed and transformative use of color. The exposed skeletal frame brings everything together and provides the spatial structure to the image, supporting and integrating the form while contending with each other; the distorted flesh manifests the tension in her painting while channels the compelling and complex emotions.

For the other relatively new works entitled with floral nomenclatures (Cherry Blossom, Tulips 02, Lily 04, etc.), the artist projects the physical and mental experiences to the depiction of flowers. These full and expanding single branch flowers, their explosive budding blossom extends their momentary bloom beyond the canvas with a contentious flare; unlike the paintings mentioned above of the flesh, each work unites the struggle, anguish, joy, and ecstasy together.

Compression, distortion, and blossom, these tenuous notions are the movements and moments that fascinate the artist. This vocabulary and notions not only come from her everyday observations and realizations but collide with the way in which painting administers the artist’s desire from body and mind. By reiterating the subjectivity and autonomy of the female, their subjective desires and mental state could be emancipated from the materialistic gaze, in an attempt to reveal the potential of life in the finite time and space. Instead, the exhibition Blooming is a personal manifesto that awakens consciousness and struggles under pressure and contradictions.

HdM GALLERY is pleased to present ‘Menthe and Caramel’, the new solo show by French sculptor and painter Ivan Messac, and curated by Lu Mingjun. His second collaboration with the gallery following a successful show in London last year, this will be Messac’s first exhibition at the HdM GALLERY Beijing space.

In the title of the exhibition, ‘menthe’ and ‘caramel’ are taken from the titles of Messac’s works, as they convey the first emotion felt when we face his paintings. ‘Menthe’ and ‘caremel’ are two different foods, and they represent two perceptions of taste: menthe is fresh and transitory, while caramel is bitter, dark and sticky. Nevertheless, it is not just a visual experience, but embodies the inherent contradiction and conflict permeating Messac’s Pop (or anti-Pop) images as well as his aesthetic and political practice.

A Pop Philosophy

A lead figure in the French ‘Figuration Narrative’ group of the 1970’s, Messac gained a degree in Philosophy before turning his attentions to painting in 1969. The youngest member of this European cousin of the Pop Art movement, his work has been praised by leading critics, among which are Jean-Louis Pradel and Jose Pierre – the latter of which dedicated an article to Messac in his book ‘Le Dictionnaire du Pop Art’ (1975). A true polymath (Messac is also a published writer as well as a visual artist), his work draws on themes from literature and Greek Mythology as in the works ‘A Nîme on a bonne mine’ and ‘Aubergine et cornichon’, both on display in the exhibition, where figures from Classical mythology are given a Pop Art reworking in colourful acrylic on aluminium. The bold cut out forms, vivid colours and the use of stencilling all unite him with the Pop Art movement.

Classical Pop

Starting to work with sculpture in 1983, Messac spent time working in Carrara, the historic heart of Italian marble production before returning to his privileged medium of painting in 2000. The new exhibition combines recent paintings from 2018 with aluminium cut out sculptures from 2013 representing the breadth of Messac’s oeuvre also in his eclectic choice of iconography. A cast of beauty queens, showgirls, astronauts and mythological figures feature in Messac’s paintings which together with a zesty, bold colour palette and witty titling – ‘She did too Much’ and ‘Clouds on Bare Horizons’- contribute to the irreverent playfulness of Messac’s work.

About Artist

Ivan Messac was born in Caen, France in 1948. Self-taught in painting and sculpture. In 1969, Ivan both earned a Master of Philosophy and participated in an exhibition of Salon de la Jeune Peinture, the young artists’ association created in the 50s. He now lives and works in Sens and Paris. Shown extensively in institutions and galleries, Messac exhibited his work at the Centre Georges Pompidou, at the Musee du Quai Branly, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Troyes, at la Patinoire Royale Bruxelles and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Cherbourg.

About Curator

Lu Mingjun was born in 1978, he obtained the PH.D in History from Sichuan University. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts, College of Art, Sichuan University, and mainly engaged in the research, teaching and practice of modern and contemporary art history, art criticism and theory. He has also served as the art director of Surplus Space since 2015. In the same year, He was the recipient of ‘N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant’. Also, He won ‘YiShu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art’ in 2016 and ‘Asian Cultural Council Fellowship’ in and ‘The Sixth Chinese Contemporary Art Award’ in 2017.

Beyond a prolific painter across traditional ink, colour powder and woodcuts, Sun Xun is more often considered a film director. On display is an ink on silkscreen installation, replete with Sun’s signature ambiguity and phantasmagoria wherein intransigent conflicts and tensions fuse the line between deception and reality, scraping the uncontested surface of politicised truth. Sun’s art thus acts as a thea- tre of the power play between authority, government, media and, crucially, those outside of its periphery.

Zheng Zhou is a painter of instinct: straddling an epistemological outlet and what Zheng calls “the divine will” beyond technical, aesthetic and moral considerations, each painting acts as a canvased portal unto a segment of observations from the world. Presented is imagery of death and monstrosity conceived from The Legend of the White Snake, a Chinese romantic tragedy through which Zheng articulates tales of humanity, desire and fateful causality.

At a distance, Yuan Yuan’s elaborate oil on canvas paintings nearly resemble in their visual authority a photograph. His works, however, crucially do not represent reality per se. Rather, his protagonists – sumptuous yet depopulated interiors rang- ing between states of wealth and abandonment – are explorations of details, nar- rative threads rediscovered in the remembrance of things past. Charged by such sheer desire, or need to understand, Yuan’s paintings evoke the sensorial organisa- tion of the glitches or shifts between actualities: what could have been, could still be, or will eventually be. Akin to the process of tidying one’s household, they refer- ence the Düsseldorf School of Photography, in particular Candida Hfer, and French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work, in the sense that finality is never fully achieved. One grasps that Yuan’s paintings are struck not with the sense of luxury and shock they appear to offer, but with the harmony between its subjective and objective actualities.

Marked by gestural vivacity, Cui Xinming’s phantasmal paintings resemble dis- placed news stories or film stills as if recalled from distant mnemonic incidents. Permeating Cui’s works is a pervasive sense of subjectivity and critique – a distinct pulse from Zheng and Yuan’s practice – augmented by a series of historical, social and art historical references. As such, Cui captures the spirit of an environment we are familiar with, but one that is under the undefined auspices of political and ideological flux.

There is this experience, when we stare long enough at an object and its form un- nervingly blurs. It represents the variances of our visual experiences when we ap- proach Wang Zhibo’s paintings, whose protagonists, upon closer examination, are never depicted quite as they are. The two still life paintings which capture two distinct moments in an anonymous kitchen, for instance, present a compositional practice through which Wang explores the meta-language of painting, whilst The history of body, the history of sprite (2019) experiments with, and challenges, mul- tiple manifolds of the body according to spatial, light and emotional variances.

Ultimately, ‘Sans Soleil’ is a pictorial travelogue, bringing together Edouard Ma- lingue Gallery’s five painters to weave a meditative visual essay that harks back to French writer and director Chris Marker’s seminal piece of the same title. Taking subjectivity and fiction as a departure point, as does Marker, one is left privy to the nature and nuances of contemporary painting and how, as a result, the perception of personal and collective histories is affected.

P.P.O.W, Galerie Lelong, Hales Gallery, and the Carolee Schneemann Foundation are deeply saddened to announce that Carolee Schneemann, the visionary artist and generous friend, passed away peacefully on March 6, 2019 in her beloved home surrounded by her art family and friends.

Schneemann was one of the most significant artists of the postwar period. From her canvases of the 1950s, Schneemann radicalized painting, extending its “tactile activity” — its materials, its gestures, its energetics — into a range of media, including collages, assemblages, dance and performances, films, multi-media installations, and environments of what she called “Kinetic Theater.” In Meat Joy from 1964, one of Schneemann’s most well-known works of Kinetic Theater, painting becomes an hour-long “erotic rite” with its “celebration of flesh as material.” As she describes, “its propulsion is toward the ecstatic, shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, and abandon — qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellant.”

Schneemann’s work forever redefined our understanding of the body, desire, violence, sexuality, and gender, and remains of crucial importance for the study of feminist art histories. Moreover, in works addressing the Vietnam War and the Lebanese Civil War, Schneemann gives us a searing indictment of warfare as a sublimation of sexual repression and toxic masculinity. Schneemann’s writings and performative lectures endure as a testament to her profound insights from within the foremost cultural developments of the last sixty years.

We are grateful for the chance to work so closely with Carolee Schneemann and we will continue to support her legacy. Memorial service announcements will be released in the coming weeks.

Photo by Klaus Biesenbach

Stepping into the exhibition, what I first noticed were two Chinese characters about a person’s height, printed in red, jumping out from the white background of the gallery. These characters provide the most distinctive visual cues in Zeng Hong’s solo exhibition “Quaderni Rossi”. A work entitled The Weak forcefully announces its presence, and it reminded me of the various large typefaces found in public spaces across China. Yet this familiar image in my head forms an awkward contrast with the meaning of the words here, producing a kind of dissonance.

On the whole, The Weak can be called problematic. Its symbolism, its direct semantic intervention, as well as its strong visual effect set it apart from other works in the show, perhaps even contradicting the rest. As a personal project entirely initiated and executed by the artist, “Quaderni Rossi” is largely consistent with Zeng Hong’s artistic language and creative peculiarities—a restrained mode of presentation that approaches “degree zero” (in the Barthesian sense), with a vigilance against spectacular effects. Maintaining a balance between the conceptual and the aesthetic, his practice avoids being hijacked by any absolute rhetoric. Such defining characteristics not only permeate Zeng Hong’s non-figurative paintings; they are also reflected in his writings, interviews, and criticism.

For example, in the two paintings shown in “Quaderni Rossi”, Divided Lines (Green) and United Lines (Red and Blue), viewers could clearly make out the artist’s recent artistic style: on a near-white background, green lines are arranged sparsely and loosely; they form a stark contrast with the red and blue lines that intersect and extend from each other on the adjacent canvas, producing tensions between the lines’ movement and trajectory. Countless tiny brushstrokes are repeatedly stacked and superimposed in an almost monotonous manner, gradually allowing different forms to take shape and float on the canvas. As forms generate a variety of connections between each other, the final resulting lines and shapes have no recognizable images to be based on, nor do they have established connections with the real world. This slow, deconstructive process devoid of individual expressivity and narrative impulses annexes any surplus value more than the labor itself. The form itself is material, distancing itself from meaning, symbolism, and emotion, as the function of the latter is more relegated to text. As such, these instances make The Weak seem like an unharmonious rupture.

However, what this essay aims to discuss is precisely this rupture, and whether the “interference” it proved for the exhibition theme indeed disguised other facts. Let us first take this rupture as a starting point, and examine other parts of the exhibition—for example, we could compare Divided Lines (Green) and United Lines (Red and Blue) with other videos or installation works in the show—what is undeniable is that, among the different works, fundamental differences in aesthetics and approach are prevalent. If we disregard such differences, only The Weak’s inconsistencies trigger difficulties and questions of understanding: this implies that perhaps the problem does not lie with the work itself, but rather something outside of the exhibition space.

We will examine two videos in the show, The Stonecutters—A Sturdy Woman and A Skinny Woman, shot in 2015, and Key-Frame Extraction: Three Actions of An Old Man. Zeng Hong set the scene of laboring at the stone quarry as the main subject. Though these two videos are two variations on the same subject, they both present very specific environments, figures, and movements without too much editing. However, these works have already distanced themselves from the paintings depicting “two sets of lines”. What the former sought after was a direct and objective cut out from reality, locating the real at the surface of reality. The latter, on the other hand, uses pure color, lines, and shapes to illustrate another real logic related to art.

The question is, can the two co-exist in the same context as was presented? Does this unity not rely on the discursive logic of the main subject to take effect at the semantic level? In my mind, the two video works—their fixed point-of-view (as though the viewer is standing right behind the laborers), limited visual range (the viewer does not see more than what the laborers could see), the most simple and basic visual grammar (intentionally reducing editing and processing to guarantee that the scenery presented to the viewer is closest to reality)—both assumed the authentic portrayal of reality, as well as an empathetic approach. Is there truly an irreconcilable difference between this authentic reality and what The Weak points to?

The last work in “Quaderni Rossi” is an installation entitled Unease. It pushes the idea of “authentic reality” to a culminating point. The work consists of a concrete platform raised above the ground at the center of the exhibition space, occupying about half of the floor space. The surface of the platform is covered with old ceramic tiles that the artist collected from the outskirts. As Zeng Hong instructed the installation workers to line the tiles according to the conventions of interior decoration that they are normally used to, it made Unease look every bit as the interior flooring common throughout cities and rural areas in China. Anywhere outside of the gallery, it would merely be a most ordinary tiled floor. If painting or video could maintain its relative independence by virtue of form, then on this ceramic tile floor, we cannot find anything that could distinguish it from the turbidity of life and the mundaneness of everyday objects. But this ceramic-tile floor injects an air of liveliness into the exhibition space. Its silent presence is akin to the ruins of a temple, bringing a sense of nobility to those forgotten by history, as well as the commonplace, invisible, “lowly labor” (diduan laodong) contributed by the latter. However, the structure and combination of concrete and ceramic tiles are by no means monopolized by art. Simply put, they are but a basic part of everyday language.  There are no fundamental differences between the tiled floor and the two Chinese characters in terms of the way they are presented here, the way they have been inserted into the exhibition space.

Perhaps this floor can allow us to begin thinking about the real problem revealed by The Weak. Interestingly, these two characters are not really floating in space. In fact, indented shapes are first carved onto a board, then the board itself and the indented shapes are painted different colors. Such seemingly excessive procedures force the words from the flat and the abstract into the real and the substantial, hovering somewhere between three-dimensional structure and two-dimensional imagery. The Weak is both text and installation. Though it originates from the conceptual realm, it relies on a specific object anchored in the real world to manifest itself. However, we tend to neglect the potentials of language and text: why shouldn’t the latter manifest as a physical existence? If text can simultaneously be imagery, like the avant-garde experiments in the twentieth century, could they also exist as objects? It then begs the question, could objects be text at the same time? Just like the way that planes, lines, and shapes found in Zeng Hong’s paintings, which seemingly have no counterparts in reality, could be understood as substantial, sculptural forms, this kind of substantiality, in the artist’s own words, is specific and real. Conversely, “abstract painting” purely based on form risk devolving into “toys of the bourgeoisie.” (1) In the paintings depicting “two sets of lines”, lines that disperse or converge result not from a purposeful layout or an effect-driven impulse, but rather a specific generative process. In these red, green, and blue lines, we can distinguish even more miniscule lines, which extend the former into uneven entities. Constructing everything on a repetitive, utterly fundamental process of labor that verges on “degree zero”, the artist returns to the worker; in making no attempt to disguise the traces of labor; Zeng Hong’s painting draws a line between the myth of creativity and the nature of work itself. In the exhibition preface to “Quaderni Rossi”, Zeng Hong re-evaluates the work of Courbet: “When Gustave Courbet consciously revealed his radical political position in his figurative paintings, he adopted the approach of painting directly onto the canvas in depicting the common labors and realist life scenes…The realist painting that he established allowed form and content to align with each other.” In another interview, Zeng mentioned that in his paintings, he regarded planes, lines, and shapes as forms that could be shaped and sculpted, not merely abstract elements that constituted form. It was a way to keep non-figurative paintings connected to reality. (2) And it is this link to reality that fundamentally kept the paintings, videos, and installations in the show together, in that they all shared a universal ideal. Both Courbet and Rodchenko shared and explored this ideal during different historical periods. And under new contexts and threads of meaning, it attempts to reach a possible agreement between art, the mundane, and life itself.

“Over the past decade, art and architecture have been transformed from producers of illusions into receptacles for illusions…They concentrate all their attention of appearance and superficiality and are translated into a cultural phenomenon whose reality remains hidden behind the ‘theatrical’…No longer concerned with the portrayal of illusions and visual and environmental artifice, art and architecture have become illusions and artifice,” Germano Celant writes heavy-heartedly at the opening of A Visual Machine Art Installation and Its Modern Archetypes. Under the control of a cultural economics dominated by “self-display”, art has no choice but to pit self-representation as the subject of display. “Concrete monistic perceptions of the world and its activities”— a real logic anchored in reality—is instead shut out of the sealed-off theater of illusions. (3) However, Celant’s essay also provided a solution, instructing us to look for answers in the succession of history. Among the criticism and exhibitions of the 1920s, there were already numerous examples that aligned art with other cultural and political practices, thereby affirming the concordance between aesthetics and political ideologies. “This method has the merit of exhibiting not merely objects, but the connections among various cultural processes as well as their political implications. Everything is thus reduced to a document of its time…Connotations of quality disappear and hierarchical differences are destroyed.” (4) Today, we can return from early 20^th century discourses and attitudes, and wrestle art away from the control of established systems and capital back to the level of reality, once more opening up to the care of religion and ethics. In this order anchored in reality, art seeks to foretell an integral world through connections between words, image, and objects.

This explains the issue with The Weak. To some extent, it is in fact a problem derived from the cultural order and hierarchical system in which we find ourselves. In 2013, Jacques Rancière

gave a lecture entitled “What is the Time of Contemporary Art” during his visit to China. He proposed that we still need to rethink spatiality, visuality, and language through the perspective of “contemporary art” as conceived by Tatlin’s time. In that period, artists attempted to restore text, image, and movement back to the same reality. Once, art was viewed as the creation of new perceptive realms, and it is precisely this aim which is abandoned by today’s art. (5) In today’s exhibition culture and discursive realm, the present state of art is isolated from its past. Therefore, it is hard to understand a foreign presence such as the “The Weak”, which is by laid bare, without mediation and representation. As the latter’s entry is an external event, it could no longer be effectively digested by the internal logic of contemporary exhibitions. To respond to the question posed by The Weak towards “contemporary art” today, we need to redefine our practices within the narrative of history and the real as a whole. “Quaderni Rossi” is undoubtedly such an attempt, as it returned all (autonomist) autonomy back to the artist. Faced with a reality in which art production, dominated by institutions, is characterized by standardization, division of labor, and outsourcing, every step of this exhibition was executed independently by the artist, from production, preparation, to exhibition and discursive content, even including the poster design and press release. The title “Quaderni Rossi” is taken from an eponymous political journal published during the Italian Autonomist worker movements in the 1960s; even the poster design is also a variation of the journal’s publication cover. At one point, the journal had a profound impact on the worker’s movement in Italy and indeed Europe, demanding for worker a wider form of autonomous and democratic organization—a new freedom of congregation. The certainty of this political language again stated how that which lies behind art is the real. Apart from the artist’s labor, this was what jelled in the exhibition.

(1)  Excerpt from the conversation between Zeng Hong and Xiang Jing, 2015. For the full text, see http://qn.res.dome.me/Storage//6066L02X/Pdf/2017/3/f3c4abb3-1703-4ef1-a147-0950d5c1c6d1.pdf

(2)  Ibid.

(3)  Excerpt from Visual Machine—Art Installation and its Modern Archetypes, Germano Celant, translated by Du Yu, The Visual Subconscious (Tianjin: Publishing House of Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, 2002)

(4)  Ibid.

(5)  Excerpt from “What is the Time of Contemporary Art”, lecture by Jacques Rancières (UCCA, 2013, May 12)

Each work is dotted throughout the space as part of a constellation of individual discoveries. The sculpture ‘EqualAtoms’ stands as the first encounter and follows from Baudart’s running interest in collecting vintage detergent boxes, admiring their composition and colour, beyond their past utilitarian function. Placed in it is a cross, resting as an umbrella would in a stand, this juxtaposed placement hinting at once to the ritual of hygiene and consumption, yet also pointing to Baudart’s sharp sense of humour: the box, in a past life, treated ‘calcaire’ or limestone in English, a rusty growth that appears, in turn, to have taken over the cross. Through the composition of two found elements he creates a sense of visual irony and simultaneously points to the power of symbolism, evoking thoughts on habits and tradition, death and atomic universality.

This balance between a sense of play and the serious is extended throughout the exhibition. ‘Stephen Hawking’, for example, the sculpture which most directly relates to the show title by referencing the late brilliant physicist, is composed of a functional yet contorted chair, a direct reference to the man’s genius mind yet incapacitated physicality. Beyond this literal analogy, it serves as a reminder to not immediately judge upon appearances and the disparity, or lack thereof, between knowledge, function, aesthetics and beauty. Equally, it points to what outlasts us – thoughts, actions, minds – beyond what we immediately take, buy, use. A sense of visual tension, the varied spectrum of aesthetic to conceptual appeal, permeates Baudart’s other works. ‘CADDIE’, in its rusted hues of grey and copper, stands as a fossilised indicator of consumption, while ‘Storage Box’ rests as a shredded, textured and mangled vestige of abandon. Plastered in silver tape it signals to a sense of care but equally bounces light, taking on its own tonal qualities.

This sense of collage – layering, patching, protecting – is echoed throughout but in particular the ‘Painting’ series hanging throughout the space. Each work in this series, which in itself plays on what we traditionally consider painting, hangs as its own form of archeology. ‘Painting No. 1’ in its cracked painted wood aesthetic reminds one of an abandoned home, its texture resembling fabric traced by use and disuse, a hint of bright pink spray paint to the top left corner breaking up the otherwise monochrome palette. Similarly, the monotonal abstraction created by layers of cream blocks in ‘Painting No. 2’ is interrupted by the superimposition of a light orange sheath, the delicacy of this detail contrasting with the weight of other works in the room. Contrarily, ‘Painting No. 3’ and ‘Painting No. 4’ point more directly to the running theme of purchase, casting figures one sees on billboards as well as consumer items such as Coca Cola, staples to supermarkets and art historical movements, alike.

Ultimately, Baudart pours you into a pluralistic melting pot of considerations regards habits, values, economies, traditions and longevity. Crucially, he plays with your senses and assumptions, calling you to question, fundamentally – and as the exhibition title suggests – the limits of your knowledge and what stands the tests of distance and time.

‘one, maybe two Parsecs’, Eric Baudart’s solo show at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong refers to a unit of length or distance as coined to describe astronomical objects outside the solar system. Baudart uses this scientific rooting and also approach to discovery to address a process that involves the seeking of answers, which opens more questions: how what we know is that we’ll never know everything; how one may turn to understand a face or a piece of music, contemplate it, yet never completely solve it. Through a set of sculptural works and paintings that evoke Baudart’s continued interest in objects and materiality, he explores this condition of going towards what one does not know without fully conquering it.

Each work is dotted throughout the space as part of a constellation of individual discoveries. The sculpture ‘EqualAtoms’ stands as the first encounter and follows from Baudart’s running interest in collecting vintage detergent boxes, admiring their composition and colour, beyond their past utilitarian function. Placed in it is a cross, resting as an umbrella would in a stand, this juxtaposed placement hinting at once to the ritual of hygiene and consumption, yet also pointing to Baudart’s sharp sense of humour: the box, in a past life, treated ‘calcaire’ or limestone in English, a rusty growth that appears, in turn, to have taken over the cross. Through the composition of two found elements he creates a sense of visual irony and simultaneously points to the power of symbolism, evoking thoughts on habits and tradition, death and atomic universality.

This balance between a sense of play and the serious is extended throughout the exhibition. ‘Stephen Hawking’, for example, the sculpture which most directly relates to the show title by referencing the late brilliant physicist, is composed of a functional yet contorted chair, a direct reference to the man’s genius mind yet incapacitated physicality. Beyond this literal analogy, it serves as a reminder to not immediately judge upon appearances and the disparity, or lack thereof, between knowledge, function, aesthetics and beauty. Equally, it points to what outlasts us – thoughts, actions, minds – beyond what we immediately take, buy, use. A sense of visual tension, the varied spectrum of aesthetic to conceptual appeal, permeates Baudart’s other works. ‘CADDIE’, in its rusted hues of grey and copper, stands as a fossilised indicator of consumption, while ‘Storage Box’ rests as a shredded, textured and mangled vestige of abandon. Plastered in silver tape it signals to a sense of care but equally bounces light, taking on its own tonal qualities.

This sense of collage – layering, patching, protecting – is echoed throughout but in particular the ‘Painting’ series hanging throughout the space. Each work in this series, which in itself plays on what we traditionally consider painting, hangs as its own form of archeology. ‘Painting No. 1’ in its cracked painted wood aesthetic reminds one of an abandoned home, its texture resembling fabric traced by use and disuse, a hint of bright pink spray paint to the top left corner breaking up the otherwise monochrome palette. Similarly, the monotonal abstraction created by layers of cream blocks in ‘Painting No. 2’ is interrupted by the superimposition of a light orange sheath, the delicacy of this detail contrasting with the weight of other works in the room. Contrarily, ‘Painting No. 3’ and ‘Painting No. 4’ point more directly to the running theme of purchase, casting figures one sees on billboards as well as consumer items such as Coca Cola, staples to supermarkets and art historical movements, alike.

Ultimately, Baudart pours you into a pluralistic melting pot of considerations regards habits, values, economies, traditions and longevity. Crucially, he plays with your senses and assumptions, calling you to question, fundamentally – and as the exhibition title suggests – the limits of your knowledge and what stands the tests of distance and time.

With an initial degree in Landscape Architecture, Everett traversed into the art of making – or making of art – by subsequently completing an MFA at the University of Toronto. A Colorado native, Everett was exposed for the formative parts of his early years to raw space, the pulsating yet contemplative existence elicited by bare earth. Citing inspirations such as Land Art masters Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, Everett considers places as landscapes, their constant fluctuating existence at the inspirational heart of his practice. As an initial standing point, his practice demands an experience rather than a ritualistic formalist observation: Everett’s work is direct and in its deconstructive essence rejects anything formal beyond the primitive. Face to face with you it is vulnerable in its unstable evolutionary state, and so from you does it also demand honest transparency.

The exhibition presents a series of works through which Everett explores the act and processes of painting: plays with pigment, light, surfaces, texture. In particular, a collection of paint and light-sensitive emulsion on blanket works permeate the room, harking in their varying tonalities the ad hoc veins and filaments of the marble in his film. Hanging delicately on each wall they too engulf the viewer, creating a sort of visual cocoon, a sensation that is heightened by their title series ‘Cushion’ and knowledge of the works’ materiality that hints to shelter. The hues, ranging from cyan blue to burnt magenta violet have an earthy variance to them as if referencing bodies of water or rocky iron oxide clifftops. Centrally-placed amidst this scene is an installation, which ultimately ties them all back to the film and exhibition title: a slab of Carrara marble rests on a piano letting out the lone drum of a single note – this sculpture, in this room, acts as a reflective hum in response to the catalytic dramatisation otherwise experienced.

In the centre of the gallery is a constructed dark room, the sounds of slow, distant and increasingly proximate collisions reverberating in the space. Upon entrance there is an immersion: the four-channel film ‘Proposal For A Defective Monument’ (2018) is projected floor to ceiling across the walls of the cube, each proposing a differing scene. The site is that of the infamous marble quarries in Carrara, the northernmost tip of Tuscany, Italy. The viewer stands, surrounded, by slabs of plummeting rock, distinct for its white or blue-grey tones, a scene that unravels the monumentality of a process that in itself leads to the creation of marvels. Despite the material’s identifiability there is the sense of stepping into a place of sacrosanct living heritage site, one that is captured, in suspended movement, as if hovering in a shifted gravitational zone. The result is one of revealing rawness behind what we luxuriate while creating, whilst also being a separate universe to contemplate the simplicity of origin.

Ultimately, Everett awakens a panoply of senses, impressions, reflections – an experience akin to being where nature reigns and one recognises our minutiae. He points to how we create and how what one builds, of whatever scale, has its origins in our surroundings and this influences its continued existence. Indeed, Everett provides a view on the monumental, whether architectural treasures or the history of painting, that turns it on its core creational existence – a reflective take that can apply to wider considerations of our being.

Jeremy Everett is a highly celebrated emerging artist who has held solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Hong Kong, amongst other locations. Everett recently participated in a group show at Espacio Tenerife de las Artes and has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Everett’s practice has been extensively featured in publications and critical reviews including Centerfold Magazine, Phaidon, l’Officiel de l’Art, Muse Magazine, The New York Times, The Smithsonian Magazine, Flash Art, Modern Painters and ArtReview, amongst others.