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 gessos on canvas. Reliant on his physical response to the marks, going along at different speeds and gestures, these marks began to render into “aimless” impressionistic painting absent of specific objects. While more paint drips off the horizontal mark, the vertical and horizontal began to appear as crosses to the artist. Liu prioritized perception over reason and began to actively paint the crosses, allowing them to emerge from the horizontal brushwork. Thus, following works such asLotus(睡莲) andBlood Stained Cross(沾了血迹的十字), Liu’s responsive approach to these signs led him to render dimensionality to the cross in subsequent works such asPark with CrossesandGreen Cemetery. 

From painting crosses that float over a gestural backdrop to applying the same gestural mark-making to appropriate four of the most iconic paintings about the story of Christ from the Italian Renaissance, Liu Jiayu makes another intuitive leap in the contest of painting – from the symbolism of the object to its most iconic narration on Christianity. Considering his early gesso paintings with gestural marks as ambient (氛围), applying the same approach to “appropriate” the story of Christ would introduce such ambiance into specific scenarios. More interestingly, none of the four iconic paintings he "appropriated," Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci’sThe Baptism of Christ; Leonardo Da Vinci’sLast Supper, Raphael’sThe Mond Crucifixionand Michelangelo’sThe Last Judgmentin the Sistine Chapel are works on canvas, and the narrative around the life of Christ predates its visual representation of the Italian Renaissance.

Presenting eleven works on canvas that encompass making gestural marks to "appropriating" the most iconic oeuvres from the High Renaissance in one single show seems, in itself, ambitious and impatient. According to the artist, he paintedThe Last Judgmentin three to four days. Liu's distinctive, often idiosyncratic renditions of these world-renowned oeuvres using colored gesso and limited acrylic ( due to the unavailability of specific colors) exemplify the artist's defiant attitude towards the formal hierarchy in artistic practice. If a work of art’s final surface is covered with little oil or acrylic, would it still be considered a painting? Can a work using a “lesser” medium still aspire to eternity and monumentality? 

Moreover, these works encourage the viewer to reconsider the practice of painting in the context of our accelerated sense of time at present. Would the rejection or celebration of our digital and mediated present be the strategy to cope with the conditions of our time, and what remains possible for art-making? In some ways, Liu Jiayu’s latest works resonate with the Belgian painter Jan van Eyck’s meticulous and indifferent treatment of details in depicting the real through the guise of Christianity, his works open up discussions on whether the power of painting can still stem from its loaded history, or is history a too loaded notion that bears just as much weight as a mark on canvas?