"This Acclaimed Swiss artist and sculptor Not Vital is an aesthetic alchemist who delights in mixing up improbable combinations of materials – metal, plaster, fiberglass, tea, coal, animal remains, melted pink Camay soap – in his quest to transmute the base into the sublime. Now, for the very first time, he is expanding his eclectic practice to include painting. Full On features an entirely new, never-before-exhibited body of work: oil on canvas portraits inspired by Not Vital's life in the Caochangdi district of Beijing, where he has recently established one of his many studios.

These blurred, emotionally sensitive paintings depict the artist in his various guises, as well as some of the people he has met here: his Tai Chi teacher, neighbors, assistants and friends. Executed in a simple palette of white, black and grey, they resemble x-ray or infrared images, transient portraits of people glimpsed in passing. Substantial wooden frames and thick glass gives the canvases a more threedimensional, sculptural quality, transforming ephemera into portraits-as-objects. They reveal the many ways this versatile, restless, globetrotting artist mirrors, and is mirrored by, his surroundings.

For Not Vital, painting is not so much a sudden departure as a path he feels compelled to pursue, a new direction on a well-used compass, the most recent chapter in a many-storied life."

- Jérôme Sans, UCCA Director