Before the Paint

By He Xiao

Since Liu Jiayu’s artist-in-residency show “The Paints are Shortening” at Boxes Art Museum and his debut solo “The Paint Had Dried” at CLC Gallery Venture, where the artist explored various propositions raised in Raphael Rubinstein’s essays about provisional paintings, his upcoming solo “Before the Paint” continues to take the painting material and its limitations as clues, inquiring the boundaries between the finished/unfinished, the interplay between the intuitive and the methodical, relationships between the pictorial and the structural, the gestural and the symbolic, the original and the appropriated. 

Conventionally speaking, one coats the surface with gesso before an artist begins to paint a work with oil paint or acrylic, typically consisting of a binder mixed with chalk, gypsum, pigment, or any combination. Liu Jiayu’s latest works began with a series of colored gesso paintings, setting what conventionally should be the beginning of a painting process as his end. In the artist’s own words, "It's a way of leaving the white out of the canvas" (留白). Counterintuitively, the Chinese termliubaialso refers to what was left blank pictorially. Liu's adoption of this material encourages the viewer to shift their conceptual frameworks from the imagery on canvas to the structural and temporal notions of a painting. 

Unlike works in his previous solo exhibition in which Liu Jiayu drew content from various life encounters and personal interests, the artist narrows his focus on art-making rather than producing content. Since his last show, he returned to the basics of mark-making on canvas, painting short lines from left to right with various colored......