Zhang Ji is an artist whose sweeping-colours of paintings focus on mosaicked patterns or relief-centred geometrics, laid down edge to edge. Spare, elegant and texturized, his paintings offer a delicate balance between composition and decomposition, sturdiness and ephemerality. They begin as strikingly, repetitious patterns, but then move beyond, toward a consummate painterly expression.
Approximating a studied observation of sacred sites with their classical designs and backgrounds, Zhang possesses an instinctive talent for meticulously working in forms, shapes and structures. The Beijing-based artist is primarily drawn to the harmony and rhythm of religious architectonics for their tactility, physical presence, and in creating complex straight lines-making grids or parallel diagonals within fragments of decorated motifs.
In this exhibition, entitled Subliminal Matrix, this precisely calibrated selection of 12 paintings, created from 2018 - 2020, demonstrates Zhang’s wholehearted engagement with the very structures and systems of painting.
The series, simply titled The Skin of Truth, features the artist’s minimalistic yet richly intricate detailed artworks which appear to radiant into immediate material presence whereupon he shapes the aesthetical effect. From earthy tones to magnetic blue and crimson red etc, Zhang used a variety of rich, bright hues as well as pure white, black and grey etc. His process calls attention to the paintings’ silken surfaces, loaded with oil paint; strengthened with the sheer physicality and expressive power of his medium. Gazing at these ethereal, atmospheric embossed-like paintings provide the viewers the sensation of a commanding optical quality, floating freely, bulged and ebbed, as if unanchored by gravity.
In order to appreciate the richness of Zhang’s compositional depth, it is essential to understand how he deals with constancy and repetition. Laboured intensity, in its barest, most elemental form, both through their subject matter and by the process of their own making, his reiterations of mosaic patterns are full of allusions, both historical and personal. Zhang searches out patterned motifs evident in mosques, churches and temples etc, as part of his sociological interests in religious art and culture, including visitations to specific locales to refine his process conducted onsite. Thereafter, he selects the stylistic constructions and layouts whereupon he then translates onto his paintings to achieve an assortment of winsome effects. That a central element of Zhang’s oeuvre reflects not only a culturally and geographically specific environment, but to also strongly linked to an exploration of the artist’s everyday contemporary living in reference to the gravity of the cultures and traditions of the pasts.
Beyond pure abstraction, colour and geometry are the primary vehicles for the artist, whereupon a single ornamental pattern coexists with an incredible formalism that is shaped by detailed repetitions amidst voluminous surfaces with thick pigmented finishes. Violating painting’s flatness with icy precision, the artist builds on layers of paint applied to produce scintillating mosaic characteristics, composed of either a bold singular or two to three intertwined shades of hues, to build up near relief agglomerations of oil paint on canvas. Actions swirl around a mediated painterly hub as the beautifully modulated patterns are held in balance by way of tactility and of the consequence of how they are made; presenting a surface texture that is intricate and memorable. But Zhang’s artistic process is never restricted to craft and service of a pattern; his meanings, often contextual and possessing spiritual implications, are multiplied and enriched by the artist’s traces of symbolic histories and the dynamics of movement that link time, space and material.
Zhang sees his paintings as meditative. Thus, the resulting works are calming, luminous forms rendered in an irresistible palette; striking for its subtle yet dramatic patch of illumination, which is perhaps their greatest appeal. It is a poetic exercise in giving colour and texture enough weight to stand alone, without the support of delineated forms.
The paintings also allow scale. They imbue physicality. Not just to create a spectacular effect. With projecting layers almost embracing the viewers who stand before the works, they have an enticing quality; demanding attention by virtue of their enigmatic backgrounds and heavily worked over surfaces. But the materialized presence of the artworks are far stronger than any residual suggestion of imagery. The details in each reverie are painstakingly immaculate, yet Zhang’s paintings can also be enjoyed from afar. With such dedications, there is hardly room for error, but combining discipline and inspiration, Zhang succeeded in this exercise. His fascination with colour, voluminous tone and detailing element is the outcome of splendid deliberation.
In this exhibition, each composition is an independent work but also integral to the whole. Each work, elucidated the others, commenting on proportion, texture and the handling of the medium. The glossy was juxtaposed with the matte, the flat with the protruded, and the monochromatic and polychromatic panelling. Viewed together, these paintings convey a sense of symbolic matrix that can readily shift in relation to the painterly space and viewer’s angles of perception, yet captured visceral at its most subliminal.
True to the paintings’ original premises, in this series, Zhang has painted with a restless, innovative and complete technical mastery. Each artwork is a fresh visual adventure with a strong sense of continuity not only as themselves, but also in relation to one another. The artist proves that you don’t have to go colossal to convey epic themes. But if one is to engage them on his/her own terms, they slowly reveal themselves as the artist’s response to his life observation and they allow the sense of things being painted and how we imagine the world through the imageries whereupon Zhang shapes a kind of expanded interrelation, articulated through correspondences of colour, shape and material inspiring trajectories of thought and narrative across the painterly properties.
All in all, Zhang’s paintings evoke familiarity and memory in their vastness of collective illumination.
Opening Reception:
September 22, 2021 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Exhibition Dates:
September 22 - October 12, 2021 | 1:00 PM - 7:00 PM
RSVP is required due to COVID-19 Regulations.
For inquiries and to register interest on the Preview List please email info@volerygallery.com.
