霍尔的这些绘画通常使用概括有力的线条和色块，强调形象的轮廓线，强调体感，这或许与霍尔做雕塑有关，形象从块状物开始。在最近的一个展览上，霍尔用雕塑和现成品在墙面上以分散的黑色块状，构成一种漂浮在空间里的碎片感，仿佛从大海里打捞出来的残骸物。在另一件作品“事物的秩序”(The Order of Things)中，她使用了手套、靴子、书籍、植物、花盆、泥团，放置在人造毛搭建的如小山丘一样的背景上，那样的场景甚至让人想起乔托(Giotto)绘画中的空旷景象，奇异嶙峋的石山。我们也能从她那些雕塑“成品”中看到艺术家日常涂画的状态：运动的线条、概括的块状、拙朴的形态。大致上，霍尔让物与物、形象与形象保持着距离，又内在地彼此关联。那些物体或形象，通常处于一种半完成状态，或者说，艺术家有意识让人们看见这种状态。这使得形象在思绪漫游状态中具有一种游离感，也让观看者的注意力可以在事物之间漫游。保持可塑，保持痕迹，让事物暴露着它自身的一些底色——来自双手的劳作：覆盖、修改、涂抹、强调。这种工作方式在霍尔的绘画手稿上同样存在，保持着对画面涂抹和强调的痕迹，对纸张的裁剪、装订、缝纫、拼贴等等。尽管这些绘画看上去比较随意，似乎信手拈来，却也流露出艺术家对形象和力度的把控，为了让特定的感受被注意到，我想，那就是精神。
Outrageous, like a painting. text: Luo Fei editor in English: Sanne Raabjerg
Painting is probably one of the most intimate and vexing things in the art world today. It always provides stories about itself. These stories set a lot of road signs for later painters. Sometimes, it heralds some sort of end, and sometimes it heralds a return. More frequently, it is just an ancient game that makes people feel like they can continue on their paths. For many painters, painting is just a matter of their own interest, and the continuing growth of their vision and craftsmanship is fascinating, and nothing more.
But painting today is no longer the wild land of artists. Today’s artists are not only facing painting itself, but also the entire art world. People go from looking for breakthroughs, in the methods of painting, in the way of seeing images and in the performative part of painting, to painting the possibility of “painting a painting” and to painting the matter of “painting”. This does not only make “painting” more complicated, but it also makes “seeing paintings” more complicated, since they are no longer as intuitive. The task of painting is no longer just to represent or express something, but to provide different possibilities in “painting” and “seeing”. Correspondingly, this is the starting point of our exhibition today.
Fredrik Fermelin, an artist who graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Sweden in 2015, came to TCG Nordica in September as an artist in residence. Here, he spent three full months focusing on painting. Before that, he mainly engaged in performance, installation, video and digital media, etc. Fermelin’s concept of painting is related to image generation in gif format. Two seemingly similar images are juxtaposed, and the audience themselves associate their correlation, similar to the method of making film montage. However, he just makes two paintings juxtaposed in space, not in time. Although he strongly denies that his paintings are related to the expressionist style, on the surface level they might seem to comprise expressionist tendencies, but that is not what he wants to pursue. He is more concerned with the potential constructional relationship between the pictures.
He Libin’s painting practice in recent years combines the way of performance art with blind painting. In the middle of the night, he paints his impressions and feelings on a large-scale canvas, both indoors and outdoors. In his practice of blind painting, painting, an art form with a long history, is forced into a critical state: Between visible and invisible, between known and unknown, between painting and non-painting. The only thing that can be identified and continually confirmed is the artist’s own existence and self-growth in the vast natural environment. This confirmation is accomplished through inner dialogue and contests in the long-lasting darkness. This turns the painting process into photography development: Developing it in the dark, watching it in the daylight.
He Libin’s and Fermelin’s paintings are very similar in style. They both use expressionism to paint landscapes, and they both provide an unconventional “seeing” experience. He Libin deliberately paints what he has seen when he cannot see; therefore, only time will show the final appearance of the painting. Fermelin’s juxtaposition in space of different paintings, creates uncertainty and dissimilarity in the paintings themselves and in the seeing of the paintings. They both paint in the most intuitive way, but at the same time they create paintings that can be seen on multiple levels.
For this exhibition, more than forty students from Yunnan Arts University participated in He Libin’s short-term expressive painting course. They combine their paintings with the practice methods of action painting, in order to discuss how paintings can be. Fredrik Fermelin, He Libin and the students present us with such a communicative exhibition about “Paintings Behind Paintings”. Here, I have just named it “Outrageous, like a painting”.
Curator: Luo Fei Artists: Fredrik Fermelin, He Libin and his students from the Yunnan Arts University Live Music on the opening: Eilev Stoveland Dekko, Fredrik Fermelin
Opening: 8pm, Dec 28th, 2018 Exhibition Time: Dec 28th 2018 to Jan 7th 2019 （Sundays Close） TCG Nordica Culture Center, Chuangku, Xibalu 101, Kunming Organized by TCG Nordica and Oilpainting Department of Yunnan Arts University
白雪娟、陈玲洁、陈群杰、程新皓、高翔、郭棚、和丽斌、和小荃、黄成春、黄德基、解炫、雷燕、黎之阳、李季、刘丽芬、毛旭辉、苏家寿、苏家喜、苏捷、孙国娟、唐志冈、陶锦、王蓓、王雷鸣、王月、王钰清、尤佳、宰鹏飞、翟砚军、张琼飞、张永正、赵磊明、郑宏昌、资佰、艾维艺术小组
Babkova Mari (俄罗斯)、Civade Jean-Pierre(法国) 、Cyril Chermin(荷兰) 、Kasey Selma Sturley McQueen(美国)、Ignatiy Kormiltsev(俄罗斯)、Matti Dubee (加拿大)、Vera Regina van de Nieuwenhof(荷兰)
– 艾维美术馆交通指引 –
① 乘坐地铁3号线，到达“西山公园”站，步行至西山风景区游客中心转乘景区大巴车至终点站下车；
② 乘坐51路6路94路公交车到高峣站（西山风景区游客中心）转乘景区大巴车至终点站下车；
③ 自驾可自行驱车至西山风景区停车场转乘景区大巴即可到达艾维美术馆；
④ 海埂公园索道站购票后搭乘缆车至终点，步行达美术馆。
换乘地点：西山风景区游客中心停车点
换乘时间：9:00——18:00
周末及节假日艾维美术馆正常开馆！
开馆时间为上午9:30至下午17:30
In a room of the cultural space that has been adapted from an abandoned factory, there is a set of installation made of steel on the floor. It’s only as high as the knee, yet it almost filled the entire room. Audiences have to walk along the wall to go around it to observe it. Thick hemp ropes were tied tightly and neatly on the frame. The ropes went through the sleeves and pant legs of T-shirts and pants of different shades of green. They were from local second-hand market. They are either made stretched flat or slightly loosed hanging on the hemp ropes. The whole frame looked like a sturdy safety net, as if to catch fallen objects from the sky. From the knots on the frame and the ink marks whipped on the three pieces of paper exhibiting nearby, one can obviously feel the sense of power and determination.
As you get near this “safety net,” you could vaguely hear a low male voice (Chinese) and a crispy female voice (English) were reading something. Ah, it’s a poem – “Imaginary Routes”. It’s portraying a number of descriptive pictures, from the descriptions of open landscape quickly zooming in to narrations of the human condition. It’s a sound of self-reflection and contemplation. It seemed that the situation was tense. The contemplation and struggle that were hanging right above the earth was readily felt, like a very low cloud floated near from afar. The whole poem was hanged on the translucent paper next to the entrance to the “safety net”.
It’s a work by the Norwegian artist Sveinung Rudjord Unneland and the Danish writer Andreas Vermehren Holm during their stay in Kunming.
Also put on display were some Polaroid photos that Unirande and Holm took on the streets in Kunming. All of them were partially painted green, like the fences used to enclose the constructing buildings. It’s done in a way as if the city is always under construction – in fact that is the case. That is exactly what the exhibition is all about – a visible, never-finished world and an unseen and never-weary crowd in it.
In a society where social Darwinism is popular, life is bound to be an “Ascending Movement”. However, under the logic of the global capitalist economy, the people at the bottom always face the reality of being expelled. They are expelled from where they stay, where they work as well as their former life, and in turn they make a part of the creatures in the biosphere expelled from their habitat. Dignity is simply something too luxurious.
It seems that Unirande and Holm did not mean to present a tragedy, nor a hymn to praise the proletariat, but simply to outline, describe and examine the overall situation of mankind. It’s those who are at the bottom of the social landscape and put in the wide landscape that are interwoven, mutually constructed and stretched to form a solid “safety net”. Because everything will go back to the earth. And everything starts from here.
The exhibition combined the knowledge of the social framework and the contemplation related to existence, and mingled them with their visual forms and literariness. They formed a perceivable and readable passage that invites us to experience the inherent power of this “Descending Movement.”
