Liu Weijian’s 2008 paintings of a pad-locked iron door lend themselves to be read as a manifesto of his art. It could be a warehouse door, but there are no clues as to what might be on the inside, who locked it, or why the objects needed to be secured. There are no clues to the location in the canvasses, and though experts on pad-locks might be able to provide information about the year of production for the particular lock, there is nothing that positions the subject of the work in time. The rust that corrodes the surface of the door is the only evidence of a past. Instead of narrating a story, these locked doors warn of the monotonous unheroic, and mundane succession of days, seasons, and years. It captures an image that has remained ingrained within the painter’s retina, a fragment of memory that the artist has rendered simply for what it is. Paradoxically, in their normalcy, these, like other images by Liu Weijian, are in no way boring despite depicting the monotony of the everyday and the role of boredom in the artist’s life. In fact, in reacting to this boredom, Liu Weijian, like many of us, finds the motivation for action. This vision of a man who confronts boredom leads westerners to recognize many themes of existentialism within his works.
Liu Weijian paints work paraphernalia, ordinary objects, the insides of homes or public spaces, urban views, and both violated and uncontaminated landscapes. In large part these subjects are transferred onto the canvas without any supporting context with which to justify them; they remain expressions of a life filtered through memory. These works are the equivalent of diary entries about a trip taken alone, subjective lyrical transcriptions of what Liu Weijian has encountered in different moments of his life. They become a psychological story told with placid tones that serve to construct a melancholic metaphysical climate through linear pictorial composition lacking in syntactic spaces or gaps. Yet, as we shall see later on, as if wishing to deny the suggestions of these placid tones, dream-like interferences or unsettling elements that undermine the dimension of realism burst into the works.
Liu Weijian uses light to produce incisiveness and to give shape to the compositional structure of the scenes within his work; predominantly light tones are backed by darker tones that give the subjects volume with the clear and deep shadows they create. While the distribution of black is always contained, it is crucial in creating the balance of the pictorial scenes of these paintings as it consolidates the image and renders it solid. It is the balance between the dominant light colors and the few black masses that provides the composition with stability. The strokes are not gestural and there is no trust in strict rules, yet in more than one piece we see the methods used by Cezanne who would begin his works with a flat dark touch and then superimpose another larger and lighter touch, and then another lighter one followed by an even lighter one, until the different colors shaped the object. Even when Liu Weijian uses dotted, fluid, or very controlled strokes they evoke Cezanne.
Like Cezanne, Liu Weijian’s perspective is more mental than visual. While Cezanne’s approach to art was tied to the need to innovate the rules of painting, to reinvent the rules of perspective and the volumetric construction of the landscape and the still life, Liu Weijian confidently uses the styles, techniques and methods that can be found in the DNA of any good contemporary painter. In other words, his approach to painting is sentimental, not scientific. This positions the image in an equilibrium between its pictorial representation and its being within the world.
Liu Weijian’s paintings tell us that the work of art, just like the individual that created it, must fight to see its existence, its story and its personality recognized. He creates intimist paintings that are born from the need to solitarily confront existence and, as he affirms, from the need to “force one’s own nature”. Obviously he is not the only one to incarnate the figure of the solitary and intimist artist, moving along path laid out for him by artists like Giorgio Morandi, when he painted his still lifes and landscapes, and Edward Hopper, when he brought the rural American landscape, and the offices and bedrooms to the canvas and the sheet. Nevertheless, unlike Morandi and Hopper, Liu Weijian is not a still life or landscape painter, he did not choose to paint objects and landscapes in order to explore his art, but to show his own existential condition...
- Demetrio Paparoni
*image (left)
© Liu Weijian
courtesy of the artist and ShanghART Gallery
