The Style of Pursuing Color

---On the Art of Shi Rongqiang’s Oil Painting

                         By Li Anyuan

The stylistic element in the art of Shi Rongqiang’s oil paintings carries on the art form of his gongbi (elaborate-style) painting, which illustrates a strong expressiveness in picture. He never regards traditional painting as his own monologue arena, but creates his unique taste in art language by the displacement and deconstruction of traditional drawing style. While constructing his own imagery world, Shi focuses on pureness of formal language by putting his perception from life into his paintings with extremely personalized experience symbol. Therefore his oil paintings have a subversive vigor which is just the representative expression of the modern art.

The application and subversion of traditional drawing style are just his imaginative and poetic style of Shi’s personal experience in his selection of original creating subject. In his recent series works of Back Garden, the painter seemingly, standing on a position with a fully consciousness, attempts to analyze the happiness and destiny in the pink world, and to give us an ultimately reading of the “color emptiness” and the emotional alienation of the modern society. Using this expression of ambiguous and joyful painting style is Shi’s cognation of artistic creation and pursuit for color in art in this period. In his paintings, people can sense the obscure expectation, eagerness and delight, even the deeply sign and frustrated mourning after elegy permeated in his concoctive narrations. Meanwhile, the strong literary atmosphere of the tableau penetrating the painter’s reviving imagination of the individual shackle and wreckage. All the fictitious surfaces conceal the real individual existence---just as Picasso said “the painter frees and senses himself in the imagination and dream by painting.” The scent of sudden alertness after fancy dream in Shi’s recent works makes people feel that the painter has a strong anxiety to time. This anxiety is not the extending power of time itself, but the painter’s single, profound and potential appreciation of the emotional world around. That is to say, the theme of Shi’s painting is not just about the birds’ world itself, but to concretize the unexpressive experience of life by depicting birds and rocks. Art is not a simple reproduction of the objective world. No original feeling, no artistic individuality. And the original feeling is not necessarily expressed in a direct and plain way for the traditional analogy is more implicit and ethereal. However, permeated with the metaphorical perception, Shi’s work embodies not the criticism at the level of sociology, but a kind of philosophic profoundness to somewhat hint the theme of human nature.

Although the contemporary art puts concept as the essential trait of artistic value, painting on the easel, limited by the material, will never get rid of the foreordination from its form and technique. However, as for Shi, a painter with great passion and confidence, oil painting creation is nothing but approaching the truth of art-expression more closely and releasing the pressure of self-expression. Compared with his creating experience in modern gongbi (elaborate-style) painting in which he is skilled, the first-and-chief delight comes from slacking the restrain for creating. I always think that, to some degree, the procedure of traditional gongbi (elaborate-style) painting --- sketching, further-painting, part-painting and cover-painting---is at the expense of the painter’s individuality of creating. But Shi Rongqiang is an artist endowed with the talent of being sensitive to the formation. In terms of the background of creating gongbi (elaborate-style) painting, he also fully absorbed the nutrients from modern art, and has reached a certain academic height both in concept and skill. Hence He seems to enjoy his own way in the western art practices freely and have surpassed the limits of style since the very beginning. Taking his works in this period for example, he sets the fundamental key by single-time painting with oxford grey, such as in his Intellectual Pig, Face to Face with no Words, In Distance and Support for Spirit, he painted extemporarily on the somewhat-pink background, on which the subjects are portrayed in meticulous details as well as at random ease. The control of color motif demonstrates that the painter has a special inventive idea to harmonize the subjectivity with artistic conception. In a picture of green grey and sky grey, a peachblossom-like crimson usually appears. Sometimes, the painter just simply created images in violet red. The vivid and casual style increases the dramatic and strain sensation, and consequently the strain of the picture reaches to the utmost limit. In the Easel painting, the characters of colors are their typical factors. The horrifying red is not only the beginning of the temptations, but also the ending of joy. The cold beauty and salt-wet air which Shi’s oil paintings show is his artistic authentication without any materialism.      

In that sense, it is easy to understand that the various experience Shi’s works bring to their audience has gone beyond the visual level to shock audience’s psychology, memory and sense of fantasy. In the modern world, a theme can not be impressive in the absence of a new narrative mode. From my perspective, Shi belongs to the artists who have different interests in different phrases. Apparently his recent works continued his previous style, which is definitely a mark of coming into maturity in art pursuing, but he is destined to be dissatisfied with fixed expression styles because of the rebellious character featuring his personal artistic temperament. It is true that the narration in Shi’s oil paintings is allegory, touched with slacken and small-scale modes. And that is also what precisely makes his painting language purer and more condensified, and in detail and tension full of imaginative space. 

Shi Rongqiang’s suspicion and ending of the “morality pattern” of art is an independent paradise where he can purge emotions in the crack of imbalanced modern art criterion. Therefore, Shi tried to find “relaxation and enjoyment in arts” no longer by traditional narration modes. Instead, he wanders in the world of the pornography meditation of mortal creatures and achieves his pursuit of color with his talented and magical hands.

                                                            （申维维 译）

作者：Li Anyuan