calendario eventi  :: 

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9/3/2010

Two exhibitions

IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia

Painting on the sea. The sea as pretext
Works from the Ivam Collection

The sea has been an indispensable element of cultural germination and a symbol of inspiration thanks to the magic of its waters, its legends, its light, the contrast between calmness and roughness and, for that reason, artists have not overlooked these aesthetic sensations. The sea is a psychological allegory that encloses clear antitheses: surfaces and depths, the absence of confines on the horizon and the absence of light in the abyss. Unlike the earth – a symbol of the rational soul – the sea is indeed the metaphor of the heart. It is the figure of the uneasiness that tortures us: of our need to go in pursuit of unknown goals.

Claude Monet was captivated by the sea. He wanted to draw it so he embarked upon the adventure of portraying it. Like him, many other artists have striven to represent it as the maximum symbol of reality but also of abstraction, performing acrobatics so as to do away with the possibility of immediate recognition and, in turn, annul every presence. We witness a dialogue with unexpected results. In the majority of cases, artists do not tackle their chosen theme head-on: going further than the impressionist models, they decide not to join the object. They keep their distance. They attempt to use water lyrically, although they try not to get lost in the desert of absolute abstraction. We find ourselves precisely before a great uncertain poetic challenge. The sea becomes an everyday commonplace icon that becomes unknown and undergoes continual metamorphosis.

The exhibition is divided into five thematic chapters that comprise important works from the collection of the IVAM as different pictorial and photographic exercises, united the desire to create a portrait of the sea. From the late-impressionist images of Joaquín Sorolla, the pre-impressionist sensuality of Julio González, the scattered views of Ignacio Pinazo, in the first gallery you advance towards the imaginary of pop art and the advertisements of Josep Renau Berenguer and Germaine Krull, the oneiric abandonments of Grete Stern, the discordant assemblages of Richard Hamilton and the post-classical tidal wave of Miquel Navarro.

We can also speak of a third group of works with front views that reproduce the theme of distance, like Equipo Realidad, Robert Frank, Joan Fontcuberta, Gabriele Basilico and Ian Wallace. In them the sea is there, in front of us. And yet it is irremediably much further away. It never stops, it is impossible to hold it back. A symbol of vital energy. You cannot trust its soul: it can keep you waiting but it can also destroy you. It cannot be trapped or pronounced, because it is ungraspable, elusive: always out of reach of our gaze. Now still maintaining the mirror-image of nature merely means reducing the world. That is why the abstract painter behaves like a poet who "tries to write his great poem with an ink that suddenly vanishes". Thus in the fourth gallery of the exhibition we find plastic curlicues, full of allusions to informal poetics. Mazes of colour where details have been eliminated: with authors like André Masson, Karel Appel, Juana Francés and Sanleón. Their tales are restrained, they are incomplete. Different similarities, celebrating the triumph of imprecision, which, unlike causality and approximation, is the sphere in which feelings acquire unexpected semantic values, between superpositions and nuances.

And, finally, disappearances: when water, land and sky rub off one another drawing threads of light. Here, of the seascape only a line remains where halted ecstasies are deposited: gradations of the same shades touch, caress each other and come together. It is the horizon, which reveals the very essence of a distance destined to become a presence, without losing its condition. It is another image of the contour: the evident seems unattainable and the concealed is within hand’s reach. It is what is further away that indicates a possibility and an exclusion. A geometry that changes as we move. To begin with, the waves devoured the limits (in Lothar Schreyer and in Eduardo Arroyo), and then acquired architectonic autonomy (in Herbert List, in Gerhard Richter, in José Julián Ochoa, in Óscar Molina Pérez and Ramón de Soto).

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Until 2/05/2010

The solid time
Cai Xiao Song’s Oriental Art From China

Born in 1964, Cai Xiao Song belongs to the generation that emerged after the Cultural Revolution. China opened its doors to the Occident in the seventies, when Xiao Song was a twelve-year-old adolescent. Between 1987 and 1991 he studied art at the Fine Arts Faculty in Shanghai. There he received an education that was restricted to traditional Chinese painting and 19th century academic European painting. Despite this, since his graduation in 1991 and for the following eleven years until 2002, Xiao Song pursued certain aims that are reflected in his works. We can distinguish three groups. A first group of works, comprising oil and acrylic paintings, are distorted, almost unrecognisable, portraits of Mao that both Xiao Song and many other painters of his generation made in order to meet the demands of the Occidental market. A second group is also made up of easel paintings, and consists of pure text, words in Chinese and English. Xiao Song thinks words are the most direct means of expression that exists. He chooses ordinary words and through them and their associations he expresses his point of view about the society and politics of the time. But, however, he soon feels that this traditional painting method is very limited as regards visual possibilities. So he embarks upon a new path based on found objects that he takes out of context and charges with symbology. Xiao Song presents an item at an exhibition in which 25 artists work on the idea of a "seat". In it he assimilates the meaning of the word "seat" in British English (the place occupied by a member of parliament) with the symbolic meaning of a bench or a chair in Chinese, "Wei Zi" (post), painting on it the five stars of the Pentagon on top of the Chinese national flag. With this he wishes to symbolise his nation under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

The turning point for Xiao Song comes in 1998. He decides to complete his studies for a year in France. When he gets to Paris he changes his mind and instead spends ten months travelling around Europe. After returning to China, he stops producing any kind of art and dedicates himself entirely to calligraphy. His aim is reflection. For Xiao Song, China should not turn into another Western Europe; it should become a new China, recover its own character. For that reason, in 2002 he decides to work on and produce the traditional Shan Shui mountain and water painting. His aim is to transform it and turn it into a new symbol for China, but by using traditional ancestral methods. His work today belongs within this context; in fact there are two Shan Shui paintings in the exhibition.

The exhibition comprises a set of six works that Xiao Song called Stones, two traditional Shan Shui mountain and water paintings, a calligraphy installation entitled Década (Decade), another installation made up of eight stones laid out in the shape of the map of China, and, finally, a site-specific piece for this exhibition: the map of Spain and the bat that symbolises Valencian history and tradition.

Década is an installation that covers tens years of Cai Xiao Song’s calligraphy in a 5 x 6 metre space and is made up of 100 pieces. In the installation, each Chinese character has its own shape and meaning, although it generates a new meaning when combined with the ones around it. It is as though we were speaking about our lives, about each of our experiences and the connections between them. The artist uses these random arrangements to reflect uncertainty and the unknown in the world to show us his relationship with art for a whole decade. However, the spectators can also make their own connections. It is as though time stood still to make way for reflection. In the words of Consuelo Císcar, Xiao Song’s calligraphic installations appropriate a harmonious lyricism and creativity, full of beauty, tradition and modernity. That millenary legacy in today’s global history leads us to discover how craftsmanship and conceptual art blend together in a very precise manner.

Each of his Stones is made up of two methacrylate pieces between which he inserts a piece of silk with stones painted on it in China ink and water. These two apparently opposing elements – silk and stone – are cleverly linked by means of contrasts: soft versus hard, lines versus curves, lightness versus weightiness and human work versus natural creation. Cai Xiao Song strives to form interdependent links between the elements he uses and at the same time between the different individual pieces produced, and by doing so creates a sort of collage. In this way too he opposes the ancestral method of Chinese painting to the contemporary Occidental method used by Braque and Picasso: collage. On the other hand, the simplicity and subtlety of transparency reveals to us what will always be static and permanent, regardless of the passage of time. In this line, eight of the pieces combine to form the map of China. Both stones and silk are very Chinese elements and with them he attempts to define China as an artistic nation. While the whole world is focusing on China’s political and financial power, Cai Xiao Song suggests we perceive China as a map of art.

In Cai Xiao Song’s art we find a meeting point between the cultures of the East and the West. They both appear defined as what they are, without interferences, conserving their own signs of identity. By reinterpretation, Xiao Song converts the treasures of traditional art techniques into symbols of a new vision of Chinese culture.

Image: Cai Xiao Song

IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Guillem de Castro, 118 - 46003 Valencia
Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday: 10 am to 8 pm
Monday: closed
General entrance: 2,00
Students / Student card: 1,00
Retired people: Free entrance
Civic and cultural groups (advanced booking): Free entrance
Other groups: 1,50 per person
Handicap: Free entrance
Sundays: Free entrance

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