Ceci n’est pas une peinture (This is not a painting)
Coinciding with the 2nd edition of Maison & Object in Miami, Art Lexïng presents an art and design installation “Ceci n’est pas une peinture (This is not a painting)”. The great Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini considered painting to be a lie, and the best painters, consequently, to be the biggest liars of all. The ancient Greeks were familiar with the idea of the interplay between objectivity and artifice, reality and fiction, original and copy. For them, optical illusion was an important quality in art. This was an apparent very early, during a competition between the two paints Parrhasios and Zeuxis. Both had set themselves the goal of making their images so naturalistic that they could no longer be distinguished from the real things. Then comes the playful and intellectual “Trompe L’oeil (deceive the eyes in French)” – the artistic ability to depict an object so exactly as to make it appear real. A heightened form of illusionism the art of trompe l’oeil flourished from the Renaissance onward. The discovery of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy and advancements in the science of optics in the seventeenth-century Netherlands enabled artists to render objects and spaces with eye fooling exactitude. Both witty and serious, trompe l’oeil is a game artist play with spectators to raise question about the nature of art and perception.
The title of the installation “Ceci n’est pas une peinture (This is not a painting), is lifted from the celebrated Belgian surrealist painter Rene Margritte’s The Treachery of Images Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The exhibition includes selected works from contemporary Chinese artists Zheng Jiang, Ye Hongxing and Quentin Shih, Japanese design duo YOY and fashion house Maison Margiela, all of whom collectively challenge the so-called “reality” or “authenticity” of images and embrace the confusion, the mystery, and the wonder of imagined or fabricated vision.
Zheng Jiang (born in Zhenjiang, China in 1980) uses the revered medium of tempera paint, employed by muralists and artists throughout much of Western Europe from the 12th century onward in their sacred pictures, to capture intricately moulded walls, façades, and architectural spaces. The light sources of Jiang’s works culminate at an intensely bright point, initiating a contrast of color and saturation values now seemingly only relegated to filters and adjustments made on a mobile phone or computer. Jiang reworks contemporary paintings into classical tropes, where unspeakable sensation and a kind of reverie is induced by looking, and nothing more. No conceptual hooks, no trace of digital manipulation: Jiang reminds his viewers that painting continues to communicate the most necessary, the most basic of human instincts in mimicking the surrounding world on a secondary plane.
The central work of Hongxing (born in Guangxi in 1972) will be part of an ongoing series in which she addresses the Tibetan mandala (translation: ‘circle’). The ancient, concentric Sanskrit symbol was traditionally used as a spiritual teaching tool, where it would channel one’s focus and concentration onto a single, complex object producing a singular, simple form of meditation. A disruption occurs between modern materiality and the sacred ideology which the mandala, itself, represents; Hongxing forces these tiny symbols of excessive consumerism into a model of divine symmetry, harmony, and reflection. At its terminus, the completed Mandala (viewed from a distance), resembles a brightly-painted canvas, exacting bewilderment from the eye and the mind, alike. In addition to her mandala, Hongxing presents a sincerely uncomplicated sculpture embodying simplicity and peace in a highly traditional, sacred format in the history of Western art: white marble. In the folds of a plush pillow sleeps the figure of Eeyore, the melancholy donkey from A.A. Milne’s beloved children’s adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin. This is a tender, light tribute to an endearing creature at rest, where all of his cares and frets are sealed away into the shiny white stone. Just as Edward Onslow Ford’s heroic 1893 sculpture of the body of Percy Bysshe Shelley (known as the Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford) seems to gently hold the dead man, bathed in protective light, Hongxing’s sculpture enshrines a troubled little English thinker, saving him through the power of sleep.
Two of Quentin Shih’s best known series, “Stranger in a Glass Box” (2008) and “Shanghai Dreamers” (2010) were commissioned by the famous French fashion house of Dior. In “Shanghai Dreamers” figures are arranged in rows for a formal group portrait. They are all the same and in uniform, which suggests the conformity and regimentation of pre-reform China. With one exception. In each there is one tall woman dressed in haute couture, a stark contrast to the others. Shih is using art direction and staging to create his own grand narratives.
YOY is a Tokyo based design studio composed by Naoki Ono, a spatial designer, and Yuki Yamamoto, a product designer. Founded in 2011, their design theme is to create a new story between space and objects.
Maison Margiela, founded in Paris in 1988 by Belgian designer Martin Margiela, is regularly cited as the fashion industry’s greatest enigma.
Margiela plays with trompe-l’oeil prints, absurd constructions and unexpected materials. Between beauty and humor, it never ceases to amaze its audience with its original and artistic approach.
