LiFang’s Sensorial Paintings
IN THE MAKING
It was a mid-summer dawn and a pink-orange light was reaching timidly through the tree branches just above their heads, caressing their skin and bones softly but decidedly, like an old lover. A few steps away, the cold, revitalising water slowly reflecting the pale hints of a wind announcing what was to come. Together with the new day, strangers' bodies come and go, come and go, gathering in a solemn procession to pay tribute to something vast and holy, bathing in a river or a lake that was sun and forest at the same time.
It’s funny how, unlike other things, the memory of water is always an experiential and slightly melancholic one. Stuck in a sensual limbo of pleasure and desire, it’s indistinguishable from light. Thinking of water is thinking with light.
Painted images, just like ideas, are never completely one’s own, but there is something very intimate about how they are expressed. In the oil on canvas seriesAux Sources, LiFang captures lived moments of quietness in nature. Reliving those instants and their sensations when she paints, she crystalizes their inherent beauty told in humble words. The warmth that returns to her body as she paints these memories is undeniable, and the clarity of the language the artist uses to express them is equally compelling. Isn’t there something close to poetry, in the attempt to reveal big hopes under a bright light, in the sequence of small scenes channeling many stories at once? The series seems to function as a journey to pursue unknown tongues relating with people's very own existence, with their kin to nature and perhaps also, to notions of time’s cyclicality.
Atemporal scenes of rest in nature. Blurred and anonymous bodies. Melting eyeless gazes and hands colliding into the brightness of the colours of a landscape with no name. The pixelized vessels— just as the photographic technique the artist uses to record the scenes — lead to ambiguous notes of uncertainty, generating candid unspoken doubts. And if one image comes from another, one story leads to another: where does it all come from? Where is the source, the beginning? Where does this voluptuous light come from? Departing from a very old and sick Western obsession with tracing the origins of ideas or shapes or both, clinically labelling things with names, here the possibility of a multitude of beginnings gently unfolds. There is no starting point, no reflection on the materiality of organic forms, no remarks on our relation with (un)productivity. Instead, there is a time that is multiple, clear and simultaneously complex. A deep interval for the contemplation of bodily sensations, guided by the remembrance of a nature that is at times mother but not always friend, an intimate dive into an emotional journey of open-ended questions.
It was soon going to be dark and the last rays of sun made the air move in slow circles. The beach, now almost empty, started to feel more familiar. Finally, hands could make their way to touch, voluptuously feeling the solemn warmth of the skin sun-soaked for an endless summer. The breeze felt sharp, coated with a smell of fresh moss, burnt pebbles and sand. They fell asleep a bit longer.
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