PRESENT-ING RECITAL LOUDER THAN PAINT brings together artists to explore the terrains of contemporary painting, actively challenging the conventional framing and contextualizing mechanisms through which their practices are often situated. These artists investigate the surface of painting – its layering and its reduction, its manipulation in defining the meaning of the work. We know that paint can be fluid, that it can run, trickle, drip, dislodge itself, spill over and out of the frame of the picture; that in its descent it can form drops, drips, slashes, dots, diverse 'accidentals' extrinsic to the artistic intention; and that these remains, the 'residue' as it were of the picture, become an integral part of the work. Thus, the exhibition strives to bridge the gap between image and specificities through conceptual emphasis to mark-making and interrogating appearances.
The curatorial approach is one in which differences and similarities are brought together into a single space: a labyrinth of collectiveness, drawing on new dialogues initiated as a coherent language of painting defined and shared. By extension, the attitude embraced by the artists has undergone significant modification, resulting in a reconstructed archetype of contemporary paintings that are more reflective of their experiences. These shifts of sense and form are also acted out in spatial terms: the composition as a whole, the quality of the different materials and the different qualities coming into contact with the exhibition space as the viewer moves around to observe not just from one but from many view points.
Suggesting themes of surface and light, becoming part of the artworks themselves, and posing a physical test for the viewers, painterly images make appeal not so much to the senses as to sense; works that assault the convention that shaped the medium or representation as offered. It also explores painting’s ability to absorb and amplify experiences through an intense material engagement, as a tool for questioning perception. And the appearance of light is considered not simply as color or absence of substance or part of nature, but also as space – such as that residing between objects and visual constructions. It’s to demonstrate how do we shape “illumination”?
It is where artworks with the beauty not in the eye, but the concept of the beholder. It will be an exhibition of expressions whereby the questions are followed by exploration within the medium, and ultimately, or hopefully, the larger body of knowledge is expanded. Hence, a search for its own suspended voice. The exhibition design attempts to expand as if everyday reality is at times dispersed like a drop of paint in a glass of mirrored water, at times crystalizing into abstract or concrete forms.
Considerations of the artworks/ideas as well as towards the design and structure of the exhibition may compose of approaches such as immateriality, immersion, intervention, instability, the void and the invisible/visible. With special attention to the painterly surface, it strengthens the sense of dynamism in what our eyes and the vision speak in a contemporary artistic discourse. Reciting a whole array of metaphorical readings, emotional association and critical meanings.
*image (left)
© Shanghai Gallery of Art
