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
