文/马尔科·布兰迪齐 拉奎拉美术学院院长

马尔科·布兰迪齐院长参加刘佑局罗马国立现当代艺术馆个展开幕式

抽象与具象，是艺术不断摇摆的两个极点。即便是在文艺复兴时期，斜线、三角形与方形虽然隐藏在具象的图像之中，却始终构成艺术创作不可缺少的结构基础。这也是刘佑局绘画风格的重要参照。

在20世纪，这种动态关系更带有意识形态的色彩，使得艺术家、思想家与评论家彼此对立。我们只需回忆战后意大利那场广泛的艺术争论：一方是以“新艺术阵线”（Fronte Nuovo delle Arti）为代表的现实主义流派（源于立体派之后与表现主义的脉络），另一方是借助抽象派、非形式主义以及具体主义经验的抽象派流动，例如米兰的“具体艺术运动”（Movimento Arte Concreta）和罗马的“形态一号小组”（Gruppo Forma 1）。

如今，这种绝对的对立已不复存在；相反，不同美学视野之间的对话与融合越来越普遍。刘佑局的创作正是这样的例证：在东西方的艺术辩证关系中，他在作品里平衡地融合了抽象、表现主义、观念主义（通过书法）、以及具象元素。这种融合的结果，正如艺术家本人所称的“幻象主义绘画”（Illusionist Painting）：这是一种诗意的分类，理解时并非将其视为对现实的虚构，而是符号、色彩与形式同时唤起多个世界的能力。一笔墨迹，可能同时是一个文字符号、一片风景、一种行为性的动作、一种色彩的振动。

刘佑局的绘画不拘于单一的语法结构，而是呈现为一种整体性的体验，在其中，书法性的动作居于核心地位：它既是视觉的形态，同时也是思想与哲学的反思。在他的作品中，书写是一种行为性的创作，其力量来自于动作转化为线条、节奏、空间与色彩。这既让人联想到中国千年的文化传统，也呼应西方当代的实验性艺术。

东方的书法实践反映的是创作者的内在状态，其生命能量旨在达成身体、心灵与宇宙之间的平衡。孔子曾强调通过艺术与学问修养道德，认为个人的和谐是社会平衡的映照。这一视野与西方的书写和艺术史相遇。在西方，书写最初多与记录官方和宗教文本的手稿相连，但在当代，它已转向一种自由、表现性或观念性的书写动作（如视觉诗）。

赛·托姆布雷、加斯托内·诺韦利、尚-米歇尔·巴斯基亚，以及约瑟夫·科苏斯等艺术家，证明了书写性符号可以作为实验性的工具，既可以依赖于文本的可读性，也可以脱离之而存在。其意义来自于形式、节奏、视觉空间与观念之间的互动。梅洛-庞蒂认为，身体与感知是理解世界的工具；在这一语境中，艺术性的动作本身便成为一种认知的行为。尼采等哲学家则认为，艺术是最深层思想的表达，这种思想常常带有矛盾与悖论，其中语言内容要让位于生存的直觉。

总之，刘佑局沿着这一道路，在作品中层叠、叠加着单个文字、诗意文本以及道家或禅宗的箴言。然而，在其他作品中，这些文字会溶解成不具完整意义的碎片，就像西方的实验性艺术中所发生的一样，从而如本文开头所述，将东方与西方统一在一起。

Abstraction, figuration, and ideograms in the work of Liu Youju

Marco Brandizzi

Director of the Academy of Fine Arts of L’Aquila

​Abstraction and figuration represent two poles between which art has constantly shifted, even when – as in the Renaissance, a fundamental point of reference for Liu Youju – diagonals, triangles, and squares, though concealed within iconic representation, constitute an essential part of the artistic work. In the twentieth century, this dynamic assumed an ideological value, setting artists, intellectuals, and critics against one another. One need only recall the broad debate that unfolded in post-war Italy between the realist current (of post-Cubist and Expressionist matrix), represented chiefly by the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, and the abstract current, which drew upon the experiences of Abstraction, Informalism, and Concretism, such as the Movimento Arte Concreta of Milan and the Gruppo Forma 1 of Rome.

Today, this juxtaposition no longer exists; on the contrary, dialogue and blending between these differing aesthetic visions are ever more present. This is exemplified by the work of Liu Youju who, within the dialectic of East and West, balances in his oeuvre Abstraction, Expressionism, Conceptualism (through the use of calligraphy), and Figuration. The result is what the artist himself defines as Illusionist Painting: a poetic classification to be understood not as a fabrication of reality, but as the capacity of signs, colours, and forms to evoke multiple worlds simultaneously. A stroke of ink may at once be ideogram, landscape, performative action, chromatic vibration.

Liu Youju’s painting does not consider a single grammar but offers itself as a holistic experience, in which the calligraphic gesture plays a central role: it becomes visual form, yet also thought and philosophical reflection. In his works, writing is a performative act, whose tension is born of gesture transformed into line, rhythm, space, and colour, recalling both the millennia-old Chinese tradition and Western contemporary experimentation.

Eastern calligraphic practice reflects the inner state of the author, his vital energy aimed at achieving balance between body, mind, and universe. Confucius urged the cultivation of morality through art and study, suggesting that personal harmony mirrors social equilibrium. This vision encounters the history of writing and art in the West, where writing was originally tied to manuscripts recording official or sacred texts, but which in the contemporary has shifted toward a free, expressive, or conceptual gesture (as in visual poetry).

Artists such as Cy Twombly, Gastone Novelli, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Joseph Kosuth testify to the ways in which the calligraphic mark can serve as an instrument of experimentation, whether dependent on or independent from textual legibility. Meaning arises from the interplay between form, rhythm, visual space, and concept. Merleau-Ponty argued that the body and perception are instruments for understanding the world; the artistic gesture, in this context, becomes an act of knowledge. Philosophers such as Nietzsche theorised that art is the expression of the deepest thought, often contradictory and paradoxical, where verbal content yields to existential intuition.

In conclusion, Liu Youju follows this path, layering and superimposing in his works individual characters, poetic texts, Taoist or Zen aphorisms. In other works, however, the scripts dissolve into fragments devoid of complete meaning, as occurs in Western experimentation, thereby uniting East and West, as noted at the outset of these reflections.