Weiser’s densely layered paintings celebrate and interrogate the possibilities of the genre. His unorthodox and exploratory approach to surface, dimensionality and perception has resulted in a body of work that is as engrossing and revealing, as it is imaginative.

The artist constructs his paintings layer by layer, reliant primarily on oil paint, spraying and scratching into the canvas’ viscous surface to leave behind a collection of frenetic lines, curves and slashes. As a result of his distinct process, evocative in vigour of the highly-charged manner spearheaded by Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, the artist has succeeded in blurring the line between painting and sculpture, using thick impasto to create genre-defying paintings.

This most recent body of paintings sees Weiser explore an evolved sense of animation that has formerly lingered at the innermost layer of his dense oeuvre. The works are characterised by sprawling patterns and forms that stretch expansively across the canvas. Weiser’s gestures veer wildly between organic forms, suggestive of insects or plant life, to frenzied and explosive expressions in vibrant colours set against seemingly impenetrable backgrounds.The patterns on these detail-laden paintings command the viewer’s close attention; The paintings are more effectively untangled in-person and up-close unearthing and exposing the deeply-embedded layers of underpainting, which are often highlighted by the artist’s incisions in the multiple layers; a process of removing the surface similar to the sgraffito technique in ceramics.

Weiser’s densely layered paintings celebrate and interrogate the possibilities of the genre. His unorthodox and exploratory approach to surface, dimensionality and perception has resulted in a body of work that is as engrossing and revealing, as it is imaginative.

The artist constructs his paintings layer by layer, reliant primarily on oil paint, spraying and scratching into the canvas’ viscous surface to leave behind a collection of frenetic lines, curves and slashes. As a result of his distinct process, evocative in vigour of the highly-charged manner spearheaded by Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, the artist has succeeded in blurring the line between painting and sculpture, using thick impasto to create genre-defying paintings.

This most recent body of paintings sees Weiser explore an evolved sense of animation that has formerly lingered at the innermost layer of his dense oeuvre. The works are characterised by sprawling patterns and forms that stretch expansively across the canvas. Weiser’s gestures veer wildly between organic forms, suggestive of insects or plant life, to frenzied and explosive expressions in vibrant colours set against seemingly impenetrable backgrounds.The patterns on these detail-laden paintings command the viewer’s close attention; The paintings are more effectively untangled in-person and up-close unearthing and exposing the deeply-embedded layers of underpainting, which are often highlighted by the artist’s incisions in the multiple layers; a process of removing the surface similar to the sgraffito technique in ceramics.

Keltie Ferris’s paintings need no theme, context, or network in order to develop their force and meaning. They reveal their influences and are independent, reconceived and freely conceived. Functioning according to a logic of their own, they capture on canvas the plethora of information and visuals, the overload, the pressure, and “all that jazz” surrounding us, asserting it all with the subtle use of the familiar. This is painting for painting’s sake; it develops its depth and objective “critical potential” emphatically and without naiveté. Self-confident and sans detachment or facile coolness, they offer potential access to the current state of our times and the human condition, affirming in intriguing ways the significance that the artist’s perspective and attitude can take.

Ferris is known for her expressive geometric color fields that synthesize an array of schools of painting, ranging from early modernist schools, to Abstract Expressionism, to street art and graffiti on her large signature canvases and in her recent “body prints” on paper. With a specific oil-based, air-brush technique and marks from other tools such as palette-knives, the artist constructs her abstract language and layers of distinct, rich textures on her paintings, simultaneously inscribing and removing her own presence on canvas.

Multilayered, and informed by spheres outside the classical realm of painting, referencing sculpture, media, and even performance, Ferris’s works can be understood as deliberately hybrid in nature. They go beyond abstraction, bearing an atmosphere in which physical presence merges with the qualities of the painting materials she employs. These notions are now strongly represented in her new body of work. On display is an energetic and confident move away from the indistinct hues of her earlier work and toward a new sense of plasticity and expressive gestures. While maintaining her unmistakable, unruly patterns and electric chromatics, Ferris showcases a newly found sophistication in her impasto color and assertive brushwork, furthering her investigation into the essence of painting.

The paintings are still jarringly immediate: broad, foregrounded strokes in hues of gray are layered onto thick, saturated grids of oil paint, while strong black lines, reminiscent of Christopher Wool’s or Albert Oehlen’s erratic gestures, both orbit and traverse the lush color-fields. A well-balanced dialogue of contrasts is at play: great painterly virtuosity is challenged by the spontaneity of “erasures.” Looking as if they have been wiped, these sections of the canvas seem to obliterate previous information, yet at the same time they provide a new sense of order and visual guidance. Softly fading colors emit a warm atmosphere that is confronted by strict grids of marble dust and oil paint, thickly applied to the canvas with custom-made stencils. As in her earlier works, the spectrum of colors and her choice of specific color schemes play a key role. Wood tones, earthy greens, and watery blues seem to be derived from an unfiltered observation of nature, and when set against bright reds or violets, they convey the nervousness and rigor of the city.

The turn toward sculptural elements and the provision of new order are even more pronounced and contextualized by the artist’s framing of the paintings. For the first time Ferris is using hand-made, custom-painted wooden frames, visually recalling early twentieth-century American folk art or  Modernism. At the same time, they contain the potential of the works within their canvases, while also unleashing their potential to go beyond them.

The “protective frame” underscores the sculptural/object-like character of the work, while at the same time, with its unexpected appearance in these large formats, it can serve as a potentially critical citation of, or reference to, escapism and the tendencies to retreat that dominate much of our current social discourse. Again, Ferris is able to introduce a layer that demonstrates she is a painter who, alongside her virtuosity, possesses an absolute eye for the peculiarities and psychological constraints of our time. The tension between the furtive flickers of contemporaneity apparent in these paintings and their almost classical transcendental and physical aspects evokes something that seems to have been nearly lost today: the desire to take one’s time and to re-learn how to recognize one’s own sensibilities. In this way Keltie Ferris provides an exciting and emphatic proposal as to how painting can function these days, while also remaining relevant.

Frank Auerbach (b.1931, Berlin) has been a painter for almost 70 years. His free, energetic, impasto style of painting has led him to be described as “Expressionist” but this is a misnomer. He does not seek to represent a subjective psychological state or materially respond to notions of existentialism. Auerbach’s task is more Sisyphean.

Each day Auerbach goes to his studio in Camden and paints. Espousing a practice of repetition, he paints only portraits – often the same people – and scenes from Camden. The aim is to capture time—a place, a person, a view. What is painted on one day is a summation of a brief moment in time and space. It is not about expressionism but experience. If there is an artist equivalent living today in the West, then it is probably Alex Katz, albeit with a different aesthetic, one more centered on capturing an instance in a certain light.

Head of Catherine Lampert, 2015, oil on board, 56.5 x 51.4 cm.; 22¼ x 20¼ in. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Stylistically, it is deceptively easy to find equivalents to Auerbach. The “style” of an artist in some way includes technique but is not limited to it. It becomes part of their familiar visual signature or “voice.” Concentrating on style or technique too much though, confuses the cerebral basis for employing it, making it seem like a coat chosen on a whim, and quickly turning words like “Pop” and “Expressionism” into trite clichés. Some Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), used gestural freedom and timing in a way similar to Auerbach but stylistically, de Kooning’s conceptual tools are fundamentally different. Whereas the Ab Ex heroes were engaged with a surface-battle against “theatricality,” as Michael Fried argues, Auerbach as well as artists as diverse as Katz, and going back, even van Gogh, focus their critical eye and hand on creating an equivalence in paint for what they see—really, witness—, even for themselves, as painters.

Frank Auerbach, Copyright Julia Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Mornington Crescent- First Light, 1989-90, oil on canvas, 134.9 x 112 cm.; 53 1/8 x 44 1/8 in. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

None of these artists are stylists though, in the sense of being puppets of a certain look, even if one of their own design, whether we speak of van Gogh, de Kooning, or another Abstract Expressionist, Hans Hoffmann (1880-1966), or in China, say of Zhu Jinshi (b.1954). In each case here, the paint, its physical weight and material presence, is not working as a representational medium but stands directly for the artist’s vision, which is the same as the artist himself. And with the exception of de Kooning, neither is it egotistical. On the contrary, it is lonely and personal. The question is not a public, “Who am I?” but a private, “How do I see?”, being the precursor to the more general “What is a person?”.

Frank Auerbach, Copyright Julia Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Self-Portrait VI, 2017, graphite on paper, 76.8 x 57.1 cm.; 30 1/4 x 22 1/2 in.

Frank Auerbach was born into a middle-class, Jewish family in Berlin. His father, Max, was a patent lawyer and his mother, Charlotte, trained as a painter. In 1939 they sent Frank, aged 8, to England to escape rising Nazi persecution. Frank did not see his parents again. In 1942, they died in a concentration camp.

Frank Auerbach went to school in England and in 1947 took British citizenship. The following year, he began his formal art education, studying first at St. Martin’s School of Art (1948-1952) and then the Royal College of Art (1952-55). During this time, 1947-1953, Frank and a fellow St. Martin’s student, Leon Kossoff (b.1926) took additional evening classes at London’s Borough Polytechnic with one of the leading British artists of his generation, David Bomberg (1890-1957), who would teach Auerbach, put simply, the value of freedom and spontaneity in painting. Following graduation, Auerbach began teaching, first at secondary schools and then at art schools, including the Slade and Camberwell School of Art. In 1956 he had the first of several solo shows at the then influential Beaux Arts Gallery. In 1964, Auerbach moved to Marlborough Fine Art, where he has remained ever since. Auerbach has had two particularly important retrospective exhibitions. The first was at the Royal Academy in 2001. The second was a joint exhibition at Tate Britain and the Kunstmuseum Bonn from 2015-2016. Following David Bowie’s death in 2016, Auerbach’s “Head of Gerda Boehm” (1965), which the Hollywood actor, David Niven, once owned and which Bowie had bought at auction in 1995, was sold for £3.8 million. Gerda Boehm is a small oil-on-board work, measuring just 44.5 x 37 cm. Gerda was an older cousin of Auerbach and the only family member he saw after the end of the war. She sat for him numerous times from 1961 to 1982.

Study for “To the Studios 1990-91″, 1990, black ink and coloured crayon on paper, 34.3 x 29.7 cm.; 13 1/2 x 11 3/4 in. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Perhaps the best description of the effect of an Auerbach painting on someone, comes from David Bowie:

“I think there are some mornings that if we hit each other a certain way—myself and a portrait by Auerbach—the work can magnify the kind of depression I’m going through. It will give spiritual weight to my angst. Some mornings I’ll look at it and go, ‘Oh, God, yeah! I know!’ But that same painting, on a different day, can produce in me an incredible feeling of the triumph of trying to express myself as an artist. I can look at it and say, ‘My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks.’… I find his kind of bas-relief way of painting extraordinary. Sometimes I’m not really sure if I’m dealing with sculpture or painting. Plus, I’ve always been a huge David Bomberg fan. I love that particular school. There’s something very parochial  and English about it. But I don’t care. I like Kossoff for the same reason.”²

David Landau Seated, 2016-17, oil on canvas, 56.2 x 51.4 cm.; 22 1/8 x 20 1/8 in. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

There is no ‘key’ to these paintings: they are not meant to be unlocked. The questions raised are for contemplation, not explication. The palpably physical accretion of pigment forms the ‘skin’ of each painting. More or less similar technical means have been employed by artists as diverse as Georg Baselitz (b.1938), Zhu Jinshi (b.1954) and Li Songsong (b.1973). The means of painting, though, speaks to a more Modernist and novelistic tradition: the experience of time. Each Auerbach portrait does not represent a personality per se; each picture is Auerbach’s rather than, foremost, a portrait or a caricature, a notable constant of many portraitists. At the same time, each figure is a person: real, temporal, corporeal and mortal. Each painting is an attempt to record humanity, in both senses of the word. The task would be familiar to Proust, Joyce, Mann and Mansfield, and indeed in many ways Auerbach himself could easily be a character from one of their novels. The diurnal process of repetition and expungement speaks to something more specific though and this is where things get really interesting.

Study for Tree on Primrose Hill, 1982, black ink and coloured crayon on paper, 21 x 27.5 cm.; 8 1/4 x 10 7/8 in. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Park Village East, 1998, black ink and crayon on paper, 20 x 29.8 cm.; 7 7/8 x 11 ¾ in., entitled, signed and dated on reverse. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

If you want to slow time down, to make it plod, to stretch a summer vacation out as far as possible, one must do the same thing each day, in the same order, every day, so as to be totally engrossed in the activity. A painting does just this, freezing a moment in time, whether we think of Chardin’s boys blowing soap bubbles or, less whimsically, Van Gogh’s potato eaters even. Every day is the same picture of that day, that moment. Auerbach’s paintings are all about this slowing of time, of pinpointing time in a certain space. Consider the paintings, extant and destroyed. Not one is the same and each went through many fashionings and stages before it reached, at day’s end, its ultimate end; with one door leading to effacement and the other leading to its existence as a finished painting. Google images, like Borges’s extraordinary Aleph, is a type of map of time and space. And in a small branch of it are many paintings by Frank Auerbach. Some brown like wet clay, others seemingly wrought of ribbons of colour. Sometimes the paint is more mobile, sometimes more constricted. Frequently its mass becomes almost sculptural. Different periods and sitters are depicted—dates are important, of course, but sitters are often reduced to mere initials—and each picture represents one day, one engagement in time, and Auerbach’s impossible but obtuse and determined attempt to stop it. Yet despite the plain absurdity of trying, reflected in these works are moments where he succeeds.

Auerbach’s painting, like Proust’s writer, embodies the act of capturing time. Each day he seeks to capture, according to his style and through a poised coordination of hand and eye, not a particular person but a person at a particular moment in a particular place, the time and space of Frank Auerbach’s studio in Camden Town, a mixed corner of a vast city. In truth, every one of the paintings is the same, but lined in a row from start to an un-finished finish, not one would appear the same as any other.

Albert Street IV, 2017, oil on board, 38.1 x 38.1 cm.; 15 x 15 in. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

The paint itself has a weight: specifically, each painting is heavy. The oil pigment often goes right to the edge of the board, splurging off the sides and swept over the edge of the support, emphasizing the sense of the painting as hovering in space, a mass of paint hanging off a wall. Like the manner of their making, the materiality of the paintings attests to their realism; in a sense, guarantees it (not unlike Lucian Freud’s meaty bodies) but we should beware of the hubristic sentimentalism that can inspire. Better to understand the realism here as drawn directly from the reality of the experience of the situation from which it emerged, that being Frank Auerbach’s close observation, examination and exploration of a meeting taking place in his studio or his experience of a scene in Camden Town. The medium is indeed the message and the painter Auerbach fully intends to slow time down, to freeze it forever in one of its many iterations, to find the perfect equivalence in paint for people, and to realize that in the dark space of a studio in Camden, the Aleph contains infinite multitudes. In fact, to behold them.

Albert Street, 2016-17, oil on board, 38.1 x 38.1 cm.; 15 x 15 in. Copyright Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

Notes

*The title of this article is taken from Jorge Luis Borges “The Aleph” (1945), translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with Borges.

1. Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, Royal Academy; Frank Auerbach, Kunstmuseum Bonn, 4 June – 13 September 2015 and then London Tate Britain, 9 October 2015 – 13 March 2016. Also see  T.J. Clark and Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach, London: Tate Publishing, 2015

2. Quoted in Michael Kimmelmann “TALKING ART WITH/David Bowie; A Musician’s Parallel Passion” New York Times, June 14, 1998.

Following his 2015 show at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, Secundino Hernández is already familiar to audiences in China. His latest museum show just opened at CAC Málaga. Here we republish a catalogue essay from the show. 

“…it is impossible to do the old any more. As Malevich says, it became impossible to paint the fat ass of Venus any more. But it became impossible only because there is the museum. If Rubens’ works were really burned, as Malevich suggested, it would in fact open the way for painting the fat ass of Venus again. The avant-garde strategy begins not with an opening to a greater freedom, but with the emerging of a new taboo—the “museum taboo”—, which forbids the repetition of the old because the old does not disappear any more but remains on display.

—Boris Groys (1)

I was also living near the library in the Spanish Academy, it was very easy each day to study every artist. And I understood, more or less, that I had to develop my own language but also [to] be conscious of my [artistic] ancestors. I began a conversation, within the art, without any idea of time—I don’t care if El Greco is [from] 400 years ago or yesterday, because I think he is also very contemporary.

—Secundino Hernández

Hernández ‘Sin título’ 2018 (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Hernández ‘Sin título’ 2018—detail (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

As Groys notes in the opening passage of his essay, “On the New”, “We experience art history first of all as represented in our museums.” One might add, to be glib with Marx—and why not? —, secondly as farce. (2) Groys builds on this to argue against the inherent limitations of Avant-gardism. Groys is drawing a metaphor between museums and catacombs; a citadel built on the remains of the dead and thereby eventually ossifies its inhabitants. There is a certain masochism to this. It is a very pessimistic, sort of seductive, view of art. This is not to say it is wrong but rather only sometimes right. One problem, put simplistically, is that the medium of art includes artworks; the canon. Modernism—and its romantic lovechild Post-Modernism—have been enthralled with progress, with developing new “languages”, but the languages themselves become more media: media becomes medium. The ass of Venus is anybody’s.

Dis(as)semble all over

Lines fly across a canvas, violently, chaotically, obsessively and orgasmicly—extraordinary how anthropomorphism attaches to descriptions of drawing, of mark making: an expression of being through mute signs. The ground gesso has been removed, scored, scratched. Paint strokes are wiped and smudged. Some trailing spatters have somehow even been removed. Sometimes there are scuffs from a shoe, the paint-pot’s own footprint, dust and detritus. Sometimes the paint tube is used like a graffitist’s thick oil pen, or lyrically, calligraphically, like a quill. Cartoons—color filed outlines—appear and disappear. There are murmurings from so many different artists: Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Antoni Tàpies, Paul Klee and Juan Miró, and older ghosts, El Greco, Titian, Michelangelo. Half-figures and heads emerge when the disparate marks and lines are brought together in the mind’s eye, like a star’s constellation becomes the Great Bear or Sagittarius—note well, here, Hernández’s Apostole’s series after El Greco. Warning, though: it is only a half-respectful raid on art history. Everything can be taken and used, and this makes the carnage beautifully thrilling.

Hernández ‘Sin título’ 2014 (74 x 65 cm) detail (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

If Groys is right and contemporary art is in a state of auto-cannibalism, a religious obsession with its own body that traps it in its past, then the more self-aware artists are like forensic pathologists, admittedly with a want to use the parts for art. To look at art, to gaze at it, involves its destruction—its pulling-apart, its dismemberment. And eventually, also rearrangement. It’s what makes Mary Shelley’s monster such a romantic figure, a creation for the future whose past is already history—dead. The line between reality and dreams is precipitous, space and time. This is crucial. The marks on Hernández’s canvases are marks in space but also with space. They are explorer’s maps for travelling through art.

Bacchus and Ariadne

In 1520 Titian (Tiziano Vecelliio, 1490?-1576) painted “Bacchus and Ariadne”. Now in the National Gallery in London, it is a giant work, 176.5 x 191 cm, originally commissioned by Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara for the Ducal palace. It depicts the meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne, after she has been abandoned on Naxos by Theseus. On sight Bacchus falls in love with her—in the painting, unsurprisingly, Ariadne appears nervous but the sky includes the star constellation to which Bacchus would eventually raise his muse. The most curious thing about the scene is Bacchus, who leaps from his chariot but whose stance does not accord with the rest of the picture plane. This was probably prompted by the difficulty of getting a model to hold a realistic “leaping” pose but Titian was hardly limited by such circumstances—witness the hovering cherubs in the “Rape of Europa” (c.1560-62), in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. No, from a formal and philosophical perspective, what is fascinating here is how Titian directly confronts the “space” of painting. Bacchus is simultaneously in the world of Naxos and in another space-time continuum: in the world of the gods. We could say it illustrates certain possibilities of quantum physics; much as Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film ‘Interstellar’ does. Painting can depict multiple spaces and times simultaneously and in multiple and contingent ways. This is the nature of their physical construction, the mechanics of their imagery and symbols as determined or made by the artist, and, with a nod to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, how we read them. Bacchus leaps in spaces—the island of Naxos, from chariot to Ariadne, the world of the gods, the starry sky, and the painting itself, the stretched canvas, the obliterated cartoons and the overlapping layers of oil paint. Perhaps this is a conceit, yet it lies to a greater or lesser degree in all painting, whether“Cranes over the Palace” (1112) by Emperor Huizhong (1082-1135) in the Song Dynasty or “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882)by Édouard Manet (1832-1883).

Secundino Hernández at CAC Malaga 2018, installation view (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Now let’s take a leap in time and space ourselves. Think of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the early 21^st century, notions such as non-objective art, abstract expressionism, and all-over painting, seem almost tamely familiar, operating to mark and separate certain developments in art history. Yet as Michael Fried has demonstrated, if somewhat dogmatically with his own concepts regarding theatricality—very simply, the elision of a painting’s own materiality, turning it into superficial performance—, issues of the interpretation of the space of a painting have existed throughout history and naturally enough persist with the art of such figures as Pollock and de Kooning. In other words, painting is not merely illustrative but exists independently within the world of things and in terms of the “spaces”—possibly conflicting—within itself.

In Pollock’s All-over paintings exists the space of the surface, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and within any designated area of the painting, and between the ‘strokes’ themselves. With de Kooning there is the infinite stroke, where hue and paint flow over and under, and back again, linking surfaces, and thereby time, folding over itself, again and again, and obtaining a phoenix-like renewal through repeated destruction. It was these artists who realized that there is an explicit conceptual space between overlapping brush-strokes, which dive under and over, thinning and then thicken, change colour, and accordingly depth, or its perception. It can be expanded in all directions—hence the “All-over”.

Hernández CAC Malaga–installation view of small works (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

What we see before us

Visual space does not replace or traduce the so-called three-dimensional space that our bodies occupy and move around in, the space that exists regardless of whether we do. Visual space is our space, we read it so far as it is interpretable, and experience it both actively and passively. Often it commands our attention, but just as often its umpteen characteristics, we ignore. It seduces us, or we let it do so, and this is not a fake experience, something trivial, but an everyday aspect of life. Imaginations and visions are a real—absorbed in the moment, deluded, charmed, fooled…all of this is real. Its role in art is not at all new. It exists as much in Titian’s “Ariadne and Bacchus” and in Leonardo de Vinci’s studies of moving water, as in the carved wood totemic and chromatic figures of New Ireland in Papua’s Bismarck Archipelago.This is the space in which Secundino Hernández plays with—and out—the possibilities of painting and its potential spaces.

Drawing and painting

Painting, loosely defined, is the application of pigment to a surface, whereas drawing is the pulling out of a mark. It may be a line or a mark but Georges Seurat (1859-1891) shows that it could as easily be a hazy smudge. Ultimately though the distinction is ambiguous and arbitrary. And it matters little, except in the relations of meaning developed between the two ‘practices’, notably exemplified by Cy Twombly (1928-2011). What is missing from how we discuss these seemingly diverse threads, is how different elements can be put together in a single story, much as a Kanye West or Frank Ocean might with music, and yet still acknowledging the wider sweep of thousands of years of practice in painting and drawing.

Among the artists who play in this arena today are formal conceptualists such as and Christopher Wool (b.1955) and more recently Wade Guyton (b.1972), and the performance derived art of Katharina Grosse (b.1961) and controlled explosions of Julie Mehretu (b.1970). Yet none address the canon as both space and media in itself. This however is one of the most fascinating aspects the work of Secundino Hernández.

Hernández ‘Sin título’ 2014 (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Hernández ‘Sin t´tulo’ 2014 (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Painting and drawing are different registers in closely related—even overlapping—tunes. The mark itself is not important—too great an obsession with mark making reeks of an antediluvian fetishism. A quality of a drawing is defined by what is left out, whether space is filled or left empty.But the experience of these relations is contingent and shifting, and this uncertainty creates the visual dynamism that drives Hernández’s compositions. When pigment—color/matter—is applied to a surface it is also applied to a space. Two-dimensional drawings and paintings are made and exist in three-dimensional space, and we can think of a stack of pictures as somehow like a flipbook of space and time.

Hernández’s paintings and drawings record how they are made—the smudges, the scratches, the stains, acknowledging the relation of the painting within the “real” world but also in its making, as a thing brought into existence by an artist—but these are subsidiary themes to how space is defined by line and color. In “No hay verano sin ojos”(2013) a form—figurative?—floats on/above a stage/landscape, the latter, note well, defined by an “out-of-focus” horizon/ground. The relation itself is defined due to the sharpness of the composition of the forms—black droplets, scrawled lines and white cartoons—“in front” of the horizon. Meanwhile, in “Untitled”(2013)
[**HERN/M 36] the horizon has virtually disappeared; hinted at only by a few loose lines underneath the explosive mass of black lines floating above. “Sky” and “ground” are both white, thus existing in an almost undefined space (a few flecks of blue streaking through the cloud of lines hints at a heaven or vapor trails). Long stretched-landscape works, such as “Untitled”(2014)
[**HERN/M 56
] force us to “read” the composition from one side to the other. Some like “Untitled”(2014)
[**HERN/M 61
], with its geometric funnels, appear almost anachronistic, and this is quite deliberate, because the disjunction between space and time, painting and history, is exactly what interests Hernández.

Hernández ‘Abierto de EE. UU.’ 2011 (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Compare these graphical works—for want of a better description—with the colorful thick impastos of paintings like “Untitled” (2012)[**HERN/EX 15 ] or “Into your eyes” (2013). On first acquaintance, these works seem to be in a quite different register to Hernández’s more graphic oeuvre. Yet the issues are the same. Here, color (mass) dominates the canvas (space), so weight and color take precedence over line and time. These works are less numerous than their counterparts but the relationship between the two sets is key to their interpretation. In a way, the impasto paintings are close-ups of areas of the graphical works (see for instance, the cross-over “horizon” work “Untitled”(2014)
[**HERN/M 46
] combining elements of both)but they also emphasize that color does not play a secondary role in any of the artist’s works. Even small marks or areas of blue or red accent the relationship between line and space.

The space of an area of color is quite specific: a large, unbounded area of one hue or shade, such as a light grey, has a totally different effect to a cartoon form filled with white, pink or blue. In “Untitled”(2013)
 [**HERN/M 37
] a central burst of yellow is brighter precisely because it is stationed centrally in the top third of the picture surrounded by relatively darker areas of red, blue and green. The overall mass of impasto paint “floats” on the raw canvas, with small marks hinting at the connection to the graphical works (by contrast, “Into your eyes”, literally fills the canvas, paint crowding to the very edges abutting the “real” world in which we view the picture). In an exhibition, the impasto works perform the role of visual counter-weight, including specifically for the visitor, who must acknowledge the physical relation of difference, in space, hue, weight and line.

Looking closely, it seems that the cloud of gestural marks and grey cartoon-clouds of “Untitled”(2014)
[**HERN/M 57
] might be the blueprint or X-Ray of the impasto “Untitled” (2013). Whether there is a connection or not is unimportant: again, the relation between the impasto and graphical works is what is significant. When we return to the latter—including works with a dark background, such as “Untitled”(2014)[**HERN/M 62]—, as the eye searches to recognize things in space,works like “Slowly taking place” (2013) and “Untitled”(2015)
[**HERN/EX 29
] appear to adopt previously unremarked forms—a hand, poles, a figure falling. In the paintings that emphasis the surface of the canvas centrally, such as “Untitled”(2015)
[**HERN/M 65 ] and “Untitled”(2015)
[**HERN/M 67
], even the “non-space” of the raw canvas becomes real, embodying form, and visually receding or advancing within the compositions.

Hernández ‘Sin título’ 2015 (300 x 260 cm) (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Hernández ‘Sin título’ 2015 (300 x 260 cm)–detail (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Everything one needs to have an understanding of Hernández’s drawing-paintings exists inside them. Each one comes with its own toolkit of ideas and manual to read. It takes only a little patience and time. I started out by discussing the historical machinery that is present in the paintings, issues of time and space, and proceeded to the mechanics of the paintings themselves, their line and form, color and weight.

I want to return to what I was saying about El Greco and Picabia, because it is difficult to explain. What I paint is the painting painted but also the painting lived—“lived” like a spectator. So I paint where the paths cross, not only as a spectator but as an artist…

These paintings are not dictatorial or pedagogic. They do not profess to invent a new language or foist one upon us, let alone the artist’s own “language”. They explore what exists already in painting, in image making. Hernández is not seeking to adopt, coopt or steal the past but to delve into the formal and physical relations that link the history of painting and our ways of understanding it, including who we stand in physical relation to pictures, in space naturally, but also in time, ours personally and that of paintings gathered collectively through the centuries in museums.

I am conscious that I am coming from somewhere. I am respectful of the European painting tradition. I can’t pretend to come from nothing. More and more though, I am not so interested in this kind of interaction with other artists. At the end, it is only a pretext to go on with your works. I like the idea of how music was made in the ’60s, when people were sharing compositions, and you could have the same song played by The Kinks and Bob Dylan and others. That was nice, because everyone was playing the same music but in their own style, without any “complex”. Nowadays everyone tries to be original and some guys complain that, “everyone wants to copy my ideas”. Come on! It makes no sense! Everything is already invented! You can only offer your own perspective, your own filter of the whole thing.

Chris Moore

Berlin, February 2016

All quotes by the artist taken from “Between Line and Color: Secundino Hernández interview”, Chris Moore, randian-online.com, 2015.10.09

Secundino Hernández at CAC Malaga 2018, installation view (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Hernández ‘Un día en la vida’ 2016 (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Hernández ‘Decoys’ 2013 (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Hernández ‘Decoys’ 2013–detail (image courtesy the artist. Photo. Chris Moore)

Notes

1. “On the New” December 2002. https://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html (accessed 28 February 2016).

2. In his 1852 essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Marx noted that, “Hegel resmarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

John Henderson’s oeuvre has long revolved around the problematic of modernism, abstraction, and the painterly gesture. In this sense, he could possibly be situated in the context of a larger wave of process-based abstraction in recent years, one that is marked by the flatness of the picture plane, a preoccupation with process, and improvised gestures indexing the real. As the critic David Geers has argued, this trend is “in equal parts, a generational fatigue with theory; a growing split between hand-made artistic production and social practice; and a legitimate and thrifty attempt to ‘keep it real’ in the face of an ever- expansive image culture and slick ‘commodity art’.” 1

Yet what marks Henderson apart is his reflexive distance to the painterly, putting the romance of the authorial gesture and the assumption of an unproblematic spectatorship into question. On the one hand, the artist admits the performative element to his work, but on the other, he problematizes it by “translations”, “documentations”, and erasures. Understanding painting as performance is, of course, nothing new. Since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, when the critic Harold Rosenberg declared that henceforth paintings would be “an arena in which to act…What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” 2, the performative gesture in painting has been a guarantee of presence. In the present age, this guarantee of presence also firms up the value of painting in face of digital and new media incursions. Henderson’s oeuvre, however, problematizes this performative gesture, frustrating a simple relation of the picture plane to the real, or more specifically, the link between the painterly gesture to the biographical real invoked in much process-based abstraction.

His earlier series of works, for instance, involved what the artist called “translation” or “documentation”—basically an extra layer that stymies a simplistic interpretation of the gesture of the artist’s hand (along with whatever narrative imbued therein). In Casts and Types (where the artist casts sculptures of his original paintings in various metals) and Recasts (a parodic series where such paintings are finished with metallic spray paint), Henderson combines the individualistic expressivity of the brush with the industrial procedures (of the foundry, in some cases)—and thus constitutes a cool-headed, formalist resistance to some of the pitfalls of process-based abstraction. One is also reminded hereof the post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s notion of “under erasure” (sousrature). In relation to writing, this is “to write a word, cross it out, and then print both wordand deletion,”3 or yet “the mark of the absence of a presence, and always already absentpresent, of the lack of the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.”4 Thenotion of “under erasure” is the “strategy of using the only available language while notsubscribing to its premises.”5 Henderson’s approach certainly points to a sophisticateddeconstructive double-ness: presence/absence, origin/copy, and so on, which ultimatelyalso opens up questions about the present condition of painting.

The title of the show, “re-er”, is therefore worth elaborating on, with the prefix “re-”indicating the repetition (“re-new”) or a backward motion (“re-trace”), and the suffix “-er”indicating a comparative degree (“flatter”). By putting expressive abstraction “undererasure”, Henderson complicates it, distances himself from it, and thereby places it in play,generating a thoughtful complexity that gestures at possible future paths.

In a way, we can see this in almost literal terms withUntitled Paintings, where Hendersonexpressively and meticulously applies each layer of paint, before removing the paint withtrowels, palette knives, and hard rollers to achieve a flat surface. This additive subtractionrenders a rather haunting, ethereal atmospheric picture plane that alludes to loss, ruination,and memory (one could think of Freud’s wax tablet model of memory); the original mark-making hand cannot be seen and yet the traces are still visible. While this palimpsesticeffect complicates the authorial or painterly presence, the slight bezel on the edges mightalso highlight the constructed nature of the images.

The new series “Reticle (model)” presents paintings on MDF panels with thick whiteimpasto strokes overlaid by blue grids of different scales. While the white background mightfor some viewers be redolent of the works of Robert Ryman, or else suggests a modernist“clean slate” that negates prior values, the artist sees it almost as “models of paintings” thathe performs according to pre-existent templates and languages. Meanwhile, the blue gridsare printed directly onto the painting and—over a caesura—on the “frame” (note that theframe is in fact part of the painting). Certainly, as the critic Rosalind Krauss argued back in1979, the grid is an “emblem of modernity” in art since the early 20th century—one sees thisfrom Malevich and Mondrian to Ellsworth Kelly and Sol Lewitt, among many others—linkingup science and rationality (graphs and maps) all the while declaring the autonomy of therealm of art (turning away from representation and figuration, turning its back on nature).6That the blue grids extend across a break to the edges of the “frame” suggests a“centrifugal” reading of the grid here: the grid extends infinitely outwards, forcing the viewerto reckon with the world beyond the frame. The title “Reticle”—the lines in the eyepiece ofoptical devices—is also illuminating, for it suggests a particular position for the viewer, asthough there were an extra digital layer of the camera interceding between the eyes of theviewer and the painting itself; this reading is also reinforced by the different scales of the grids, alluding to shifting foci of vision (for example, when zooming in or out). Together with a consciousness of the history of painting in the last hundred years, these paintings also evince an awareness of how paintings are viewed—these days, more often than not through the camera of a mobile phone.

In a way, this train of enquiry extends from Henderson’s earlier photographic series Flowers, (where he had photographs painted over, then digitally scanned, and fictively displayed in a simulated space, and then finally printed as photographs of unique copies). Such a complex overlay of painting and photographic processes direct attention on the possible manipulation of images and serve notice to viewers to observe closely and pay attention, all the while aligning the aesthetic with the cognitive and the critical. With Reticle (model), juxtaposing the personally expressive strokes and the rationality of the grid generates a tension between spontaneity and construction, while positioning the modernist emblem of the grid in relation to the digital ushers in questions about the importance and condition of painting in the larger, almost overwhelming expanse of visual culture and digital imagery.

Daniel Szehin Ho

Hu Weiqi fills his red with hopefulness, thoughts of happiness and beauty, while blue – with a cold reality of things poisoned with fear, stress and ugliness. Seemingly opposite moods that collide in Hu Weiqi’s paintings are at the same time interconnected and complimentary. As they interrelate they create a symbiosis where one gives rise to the other. In this color metaphor, he advocates tireless pursuit of somewhat idealistic but bright future devoid of anxiety, doubts and troubles. He draws a hard and fast line between opposing notions, and yet in his paintings the confronting powerful streams are not isolated from one another but they collide to form a synthesis that makes up a painterly metaphor for the reality his society lives in. The solo show “Entangled in Duality” by Hu Weiqi, reinforces the fact that despite the tides of reoccurring destructions and restorations, the transition that instigated social upheavals has also activated the process of an unprecedented cultural revival. About Hu Weiqi Hu Weiqi ( 胡卫齐 ), born 1987 in Yiyang, Hunan Province, China, graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2015. His works of painting present the complexity of China’s social environment (politically and culturally) by drawing special attention to the effects of its rapidly transitioning society. Using two bold colors to symbolize the inner conflicts experienced by the younger generation, Weiqi depicts the in- between position of a generation puzzled by the constant changes in their environment. His works have been featured in a range of group shows including 2015 Youth Art 100 Start Exhibition (National Agricultural Exhibition Hall, Beijing), College Color (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing), Individual Visions (Hong Kong Cadillac Center, Hong Kong and Chengdu), Spring – Chongqing Young Artists Exhibition (Zhongshan Art Museum, Chongqing), Go! Young! Youth Cutting-Edge Invitational Exhibition (Art Center, Beijing), and The Trouble – Four Exhibitions (New Sound Art Space, Chongqing).

Amanda Heng—We Are The World, These Are Our Stories

Singapore Tyler Print Institute (41 Robertson Quay), Until February 25, 2017

The Singapore Tyler Print Institute’s program of residencies is a well-worn one, furnishing artists who don’t generally specialize in print or paper with the technical resources and expertise to use it. Despite its familiarity, this recipe continues to demonstrate the potential to produce surprises, the latest being the result of a collision of this model and the performative practice of veteran artist Amanda Heng.

Apparently champing at the bit to avail their knowledge and abilities to Heng, the institute’s technical team was temporarily flummoxed when the artist asked them about themselves instead. The prints which constitute the exhibition are the outcome of conversations between Heng and a diverse cast of individuals, including STPI staff and participants of an earlier series, “Let’s Chat” (1996–ongoing).

Each conversation yielded a pair of prints, one to be read visually and one by QR code reader, the latter being links to pieces of audiovisual media. One such pair features an image of STPI chief printer Eitaro Ogawa in conversation with his daughters, concerning the concepts of trust and liberty, with a backdrop of a regular grid of American quarters. Somewhat incongruously, the image is bordered by LED ticker-type text of a headline of the September 11 attack. In line with the image’s suggested theme, the accompanying QR code links to approximately nine minutes of video of various people discussing the meaning of said concepts. With the artist sharing creative control with each print’s interlocutor, the exhibition might come across as aesthetically patchy, yet nevertheless an intriguing foil to STPI—just as STPI bills this as Heng’s first solo gallery presentation, so too is it the Institute’s first time hosting such socially oriented, relational work.

Installation view of “Amanda Heng—We Are The World, These Are Our Stories”
“王良吟：我们即是世界，这是我们的故事”展览现场

Installation view of “Amanda Heng—We Are The World, These Are Our Stories”
“王良吟：我们即是世界，这是我们的故事”展览现场

Installation view of “Amanda Heng—We Are The World, These Are Our Stories”
“王良吟：我们即是世界，这是我们的故事”展览现场

Installation view of “Amanda Heng—We Are The World, These Are Our Stories”
“王良吟：我们即是世界，这是我们的故事”展览现场

Xue Mu—Liquid Truth

Yeo Workshop (#01-01, 1 Lock Road), Until March 31, 2017

Canonicity in art history invites considerable debate, particularly when differing aesthetic traditions collide. In “Liquid Truth”, Xue Mu’s second solo exhibition in Singapore, the artist turns a critical eye to the sculptural canon, with special emphasis on its valorization of the masculine form, for which Michelangelo’s “David” and Rodin’s “Thinker” stand in.

Much of the show is given over to Mu’s application of the techniques of photography and re-photography (which may involve photographing an image or object, manipulating the result physically, and photographing the result). The centerpiece of the show, “Liquid Truth_Curtain” (2016), for example, appears to be the result of vertically compressing an image of David, projecting it onto a free-hanging, undulating sheet of fabric, photographing the doubly-distorted result, and then printing that image on a large, free-hanging curtain, which is placed immediately inside the gallery doors.

A similarly destructive/distorting iterative process, not unlike a bad file compression, can be seen in “Liquid Truth_Thinkers Crumpled 2” (2016), which presents us with a lavishly detailed image of a crumpled ball of paper—which is, in truth, a crumpled copy of “Liquid Truth_Thinkers Crumpled 1” (2016), which depicts a crumpled image of Rodin’s “Thinker”. While these engagements with the sculptural canon and its valorization of the masculine are, on one level, superficial, the evident intensity and precision with which Mu regards her material provokes no small amount of critical reflection.

Installation view of “Xue Mu—Liquid Truth”
“牟雪：液态真理”展览现场

Installation view of “Xue Mu—Liquid Truth”
“牟雪：液态真理”展览现场

The Photograph as Atlas

DECK (120A Prinsep Street), Until February 12, 2017

As one of a handful of affiliate projects of the Singapore Biennale, “The Photograph as Atlas” presents two artists whose works couldn’t, at first glance, seem any more different. This might explain why they’re housed in wholly separate spaces at DECK, a photography-focused institution whose premises consist mostly of repurposed, standardized intermodal containers.

Ang Song Nian’s “Hanging Heavy on My Eyes” (2016) envelops us in a vista of greyness both ethereal and industrial—appropriate enough, given that the work centers on the semi-regular phenomenon of “haze,” or air pollution, in Singapore. Regular grids of small prints line the walls, and their resemblance to a calendar is apt enough—the work as a whole is derived from air-quality levels from the period of January to October 2016, with said readings supplying the particular shades and gradients on each print. There is something surreal in presenting something so visceral in this way which is amplified by the Turrell-esque ambience effected by rounded corners, diffuse lighting and the light grey coloration of the gallery.

Robert Zhao’s “The Natural History of an Island” (2016), by contrast, presents a startlingly green enclosure, with even the room’s air-conditioning units tucked behind wooden panels–one of the few other colors which stands out all the more in a sea of green. It is a “greening” of sorts that seems quite congruent with Singapore’s own development-first, notionally green image of the Garden City. As its title suggests, the work lays claim to charting, in some fashion, the natural history of Singapore over a hundred year period—from the plantation-based resource extraction of the colonial era to the present day.

Given the artist’s long-running penchant for bio-fictional photo-manipulations, particularly of archival imagery, another sense pervades the installation: of liminality and uncertainty—concerning which images and facts have been altered, to what extent, and to what end. Like the artist’s recently concluded solo “The Bizarre Honour” (an anagram of the artist’s name, incidentally) the works presented suggest a cabinet of curiosities, a self-enclosed space to meditate upon our real and imagined relationship with the natural world, with a particular emphasis on a magical-realist account of something not unlike reforestation.

Installation view of “The Photograph as Atlas”
“作为阿特拉斯的照片”展览现场

Installation view of “The Photograph as Atlas”
“作为阿特拉斯的照片”展览现场

Installation view of “The Photograph as Atlas”
“作为阿特拉斯的照片”展览现场

Zhu Jinshi—Presence of Whiteness

Pearl Lam Galleries (#03-22, 9 Lock Road, and #01-08, 15 Dempsey Road). Until April 31, 2017

The most attention-grabbing aspect of this exhibition—more so, perhaps, than Zhu Jinshi’s intense impasto—is its presentation in two separate venues with distinctly different work in each. It’s as much a platform for Zhu’s work as it is an announcement of the versatility and flexibility the gallery can afford, with, in this instance, their Gillman Barracks space presenting a more conceptually driven, historically concerned body of works, while the Dempsey gallery brings us more saleable—through no less rigorous—individual paintings.

The centerpiece of the exhibition as a whole is “Presence of Whiteness 2” (2016-17) at Gillman Barracks—an eye-opening quantity of black oil paint of equivalent volume to the reinforced canvas stretchers. One of the central propositions of Zhu’s practice, that of the physicality of the medium, is borne out by these masses of paint; subdued lighting and white-painted floors contribute to a paradoxically ethereal sense of weight, not unlike the monolith of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Produced on-site per the artist’s specifications, as is also true for several other elements in the Gillman Barracks space, the exhibition also reflects the conceptual notion of dissociation from the artist’s hand.

Pearl Lam Galleries’ Dempsey space, by contrast, plays host to more painterly works by the artist: from stark monochromes to exuberantly polychromatic compositions resembling anything from alien landscapes to strange geological strata. While massive impasto runs the risk of coming across either as an expressive cliché or a bald statement of “look how much paint I can afford,” Zhu’s long-standing interest in paint’s material, physical qualities, probing the limits of painting, writes off any such reflexive dismissal. Dramatically extended beyond the plane of their respective canvases, these paintings seem to occupy more space than the paint itself would suggest, while also inviting minute inspection of infinitesimal details.

Installation view of “Zhu Jinshi—Presence of Whiteness”
“朱金石：颜料的空缺”展览现场

Installation view of “Zhu Jinshi—Presence of Whiteness”
“朱金石：颜料的空缺”展览现场

Installation view of “Zhu Jinshi—Presence of Whiteness”
“朱金石：颜料的空缺”展览现场

Installation view of “Zhu Jinshi—Presence of Whiteness”
“朱金石：颜料的空缺”展览现场

Installation view of “Zhu Jinshi—Presence of Whiteness”
“朱金石：颜料的空缺”展览现场

In Spring 2017, M WOODS will present a retrospective exhibition of the work of artist Cristof Yvoré (1967 – 2013). It will be the first ever museum exhibition of Yvoré’s work in Asia, as well as the artist’s first solo exhibition outside of Europe and North America. Cristof Yvoré at M WOODS will present paintings from many stages of the French painter’s career, ranging from his early experiments with space to the heavily impastoed floral works he made before his death at the age of 47.

For years, living in Marseille, Cristof Yvoré painted the same motifs repeatedly: corners of rooms, daylight thrown against bare walls, flowers, curtains, plates and bowls on tables. These commonplace subjects became the site for the artist’s restless exploration of the physicality of paint, resulting in heavily oversaturated works whose weight and texture estrange the viewer from any assumed familiarity with the objects depicted. With an intensity of focus reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi, Yvoré worked at his still lifes and interiors persistently, and without any apparent reference to contemporary artistic developments. Moreover, he painted from memory, not reality, imbuing his subjects with all the subjectivity and uncertainty of remembered things. Occasionally, Yvoré’s works are interrupted by mysteriously placed objects or an unconventional sense of gravity, drawing attention to the metaphysical within an otherwise ordinary scene.

Curated by Wanwan Lei, Cristof Yvoré is the second in a series of major solo exhibitions at M WOODS, whose mission is to promote emerging or overlooked artists while illuminating new perspectives on established ones. The first exhibition in this M WOODS series was Andy Warhol: Contact (August 6, 2016 – January 7, 2017).

A graduate from the China Academy of Art Oil Painting Department in Hangzhou, Wang treats the medium of oil on canvas as a crucial player in her aim to confound our temporal and spatial notions. Transcending traditionalism through the subject matter depicted, which is both curious and challenging, Wang channels her painting to represent the variances of our visual experiences, “similar to the reflection on the surface of water: capable of capturing the multiple manifolds of a subject.” [1] What is represented is a synthesis though, a more accurate portrayal of the actual; in relation to the cosmic – a wormhole. Indeed, as described by Wang, “the variations of dots, lines, contours, paints, impasto, light rendering, colours and shadows… facilitate the poetic representation of reality.” [2]

The grand panoramic work ‘Weather Forecast’ (2016), for example, depicts a dewy and nearly spectacular tropical landscape. Dotted by hovering spheres that in themselves resemble planets, the painterly finish hints to illusions, a magical environs, a sentiment that is heightened by the rising mist. Albeit a different subject matter, ‘Summer Kitchen’ (2016) extends Wang’s consideration of associations. Depicting multiple vegetables including a roasted chicken, the painting at first sight appears as a classical still life of preparatory items for a meal. Upon closer inspection, however, there is a deliberate associative distortion as well as several unidentifiable objects, which consequently skew our perception. ‘Swaddling’ (2016) follows from this, presenting various wrapped vegetables under a ledge; recognisable items, their placement and display takes on a bodily association: hanging, balancing, piled, positioned.

Moving from environmental and domestic renderings, Wang equally presents an array of people; rather than immersing herself amidst them though, she takes an observational, anthropological stance, seemingly capturing a tribal set – indistinctly from the past, present or future – from afar, as they engage with daily activities, from washing utensils, ‘Last Man’ (2016), to seemingly ritualistic dancing, ‘Dancing is Better’ (2016). Despite these paintings’ references to human presence, however, one notes that each is crucially devoid of human expression. ‘Mother and Son’ (2015), for example, transplants a classically religious composition. Yet, the setting is distinctly ethnic with various skulls scattered upon the floor and both figures being adorned by bead-like wooden jewellry. More importantly, whilst the mother’s face is delineated, the child’s is unnervingly blurred to the extent of resembling defacement. Such vigorous anonymity heightens our consciousness of how much is read through facial features, expressions, the very characteristics that distinguish each and every one of us.

Ultimately, these works present a new vein in Wang’s practice, moving between time and space, challenging our understanding of what constitutes daily life. From the spaces we could inhabit, the items we may eat, to the rituals we perhaps share with others, Wang provides through her exhibition a portal into another mode of living, a fully-formed set of life, which is distinct yet not utterly dissimilar to our own. Invited voyeurism, we are urged to view, discover and understand another, which may or may not be of this world, or indeed universe.

Wang Zhibo is a highly regarded female Chinese painter who rose to prominence after being awarded the prestigious national Luo Zhongli Scholarship in 2008. Wang’s work has since been exhibited from Hong Kong to New York, including exhibitions at the Penrith Regional Gallery, Sydney; Chongqing Art Museum, Chongqing; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Wang was selected as one of the top female Chinese artists to observe and featured by writer Luise Guest for her book on female Chinese artists ‘Half the Sky’ published in 2016.

[1] Wang Zhibo, Interview, August 2016
[2] Wang Zhibo, Interview, August 2016