The Paint Had Dried

Text by Zhou Yi

Translated by Fiona He

Once, not all that long ago, artists could establish their dissidence through the innovative originality of their work, but the avant-garde strategy of rupture, the creation of an iconoclastic artwork, has become so thoroughly assimilated as to no longer serve as proof of anything more than that the artist is a good student.

——Raphael Rubinstein (Provisional Painting Part Two, To Rest Lightly On Earth, 2012)

The paint has left the tube, then used and diminished.

The paint came in contact with the canvas until its humidity evaporated.

The paint decomposes and loses its function to be painted. 

Engendering a life constructed on fading matter.

——Liu Jiayu, 2022

Liu Jiayu's love of playing the saxophone and studying jazz composition while attending art school in Chicago led him to ponder the connection between visual and acoustic abstractions, specifically painting's physical surface vs. improvised music, and his paintings emphasize the inevitability of fluidity and transience, like moods. The moment of resolution often arrives abruptly in the process, before ending in sight, giving the impression of not lacking certainty but a heightened sense of intentionality. The painter works within the limitations of the medium and deliberately amplifies them, just as Pollock throws his body into the gravitational field of paint, Liu Jiayu throws himself into the pigment’s temporal. The evaporation process of paint, akin to an hourglass, determines the time limit of a painting's life. Squeezing the paint and picking up the brush are seen as chances, one at a time, limited chances that are accepted by the painter. 

Painting is indeed similar to a Jazz gig, where improvisation requires a reserve of talent and skill beyond the norm in order to step into the zone that allows one to forget the techniques. On the other hand, painting is different. It freezes the result before the spectator, and all the prior actions have faded with time. Can true passion be fully represented within a frame? Would a phony brushstroke be detected? Do the dancing gestures express the painter's feelings, or are they manipulating the spectator into believing that they speak volumes of the painter's emotions? Although the physical gestures are not reproducible, the traces left behind are in plain sight, which puts to test the viewer's ability to distinguish theatricality from genuine outpour. Fortunately, none of this concerns professional knowledge of art practices, art works that revealed the process in the outcome intends to transcend connoisseurship and aesthetic taste. One need not to worry about art either, the ability to distinguish true from false can be a special sort of aesthetic judgement, one that requires curiosity rather than painting appreciation.

To further understand Liu Jiayu's current practice, it is necessary to reference the discussion on provisional painting, the term refers to a sense of unfinishedness. Raphael Rubinstein's two influential essays entitled "Provisional Painting", written in 2009 and 2012, describe his observations of current trends in artists' work while retracing and sorting out its historical origin, with examples of the cult of amateurism, the strategy of refusal, existential skepticism, and other healthy anti-art genes within the system of modern painting. In reality, artistic practices' tendency to squeeze out aesthetic judgment has anchored firmly in the mainstream since the 1960s. Artists resisted the dualistic inertia of thought and aesthetic preference through the two paths in conceptual mechanisms and physical process (not the traditional accumulation of experience). It is the effort in the latter direction that gives Liu Jiayu's paintings a dazed, free-flowing impression. His approach to painting is to connect with his own person and open the painting process to his everyday moods. Moods freely enter and exit, enabling Liu Jiayu's works to be closely linked to his actual being, to the extent that exceeds his professional desire to maintain a consistent style and subject matter. This conservatism, his decision of "giving it all up" specifically in a media age where it is impossible to distinguish between radicalism and being a good student, allows us a glimpse into the real amongst the professional faces of the young artists today. Even though his practice is outwardly open, it is only to an immediate vicinity, in his unique unfinishedness. Grounded on the artist's strong personality, Liu presents a long-lost way of working, reminiscent of the early modernist painters such as Picasso, Matisse, and Miro, who freely go between the modes of depiction and abstraction, painting and anti-painting, connecting new concepts with the tradition of painting through poetic making instead of being rashly divisive. Provisionality or unfinishedness marks a lax sense of boundaries that no medium would easily accept. Liu Jiayu's broader tolerance level, akin to many of the artists mentioned in Rubinstein's "Provisional Painting" article, comes from a credible, unconcealed process, and a true indifference to process and outcome, abstraction and figuration. Even if to stop painting at a random second, a process steered away from aesthetic decisions would permit the picture a sense of objectivity and it would not appear at any moment far-fetched. Another crucial common denominator of provisional painting, presented in Rubinstein's text, shown in his writing style rather than explicitly stated, was the painters' ability to leap out of the box and humorously dealing with the existential crisis that previous generations of artists (Giacometti, Gaston) had been torn with their entire lives, are now anachronistic. Ruinously conceive, destructively build, seriously casual, and painting out as painting, these acts of reconciling contradictions worked to dissolve the creative angst. Liu Jiayu's decision to not define his practice has been deliberate. A painter shall pursue an even higher degree of self-cancellation. This statement sounds absurd but not entirely farce, and Liu Jiayu's painting practice should not be misinterpreted as ironic. Perhaps due to his seriousness in this matter, he instinctively rejects the experience he has already gained; instead, he accepts chances that a painting presents, accepting his own person, the up and down fluctuation of moods, and moody expressions.

"The Paint Had Dried" marks the first collaboration between CLC Gallery Venture and the artist Liu Jiayu. This solo exhibition includes his creative practice of the past two years, as well as a small number of earlier related works. The exhibition will be open from October 8th to November 13th 2022. Born in 1992, Liu Jiayu graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and he currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.