We are glad to announce Gao Ludi’s solo exhibition, 1:1 at Qiao Space, opening on November 11, 2020, and continues to January 31, 2021. Other than acrylic works on canvas, this exhibition will comprehensively unveil the Reality series (2017-2020), mixed media on wooden panels.
At the center of the exhibition hall, a temporary building brings together the Reality series on site. This series’s former incarnation traces back to the artist’s experimentation with mixed materials on small-sized wooden panels in 2010. Since 2017, this genre of works, under the titled Reality, has developed to today’s complexity level. In this series, the artist’s work is to switch between the roles of a painter, an editor, and a planner. He often chooses a medium-sized canvas or board at hand and uses it as an interface of his work or the parameter of the plans he conspires. He then refines and selects the materials that are fitting to the image. The industrial or consumer materials of everyday reality, as the embodiments of collective wisdom, and the glistening and pure colors and smooth textures, exhibit a contemporary quality, while their perfect geometric forms embody timeless structures and meanings. The specific dimension, color, and texture of the materials provide the direction, boundary, and structure that determine the work’s development. In turn, the artist responds to these qualities by constructing colors, lines, forms, and brushstrokes with paint and brushwork, and in so doing, to integrate these elements.
In addition, the given thickness and shape of the material and the object under the illumination naturally distinguish light and shade while maintaining considerable restraint for its overall presentation that would allow the viewer to swing between the deceptively “flat” and “three-dimensional” when viewed them from far and near, left and right, and at different heights. The texture of the object’s material, delicate or coarse, clashes and resonates with those painted by the brush, affording the work a dynamic and skittish rhythm. In this repeated progress and deliberation, the two-dimensional plane is pulled and elevated. In contrast, the three-dimensional form is pulled and sunken – the two notions seem to engage in an “oppositional” struggle with painting while advancing in conspiring with the “reality” in the building of new painting language. Hence, materials lost their former practicalities through the artist’s extraction, polishing, smearing, and grafting, while in the process, they have been liberated and reborn. Meanwhile, the artist’s consciousness is written into the imagery. With colors, strokes, and connotations to break through the plane, stirring and growing in the visual and psychological dimensions, stepping into poetic realms and releasing the potential of new “reality.”
The acrylic paintings distributed around the exhibition hall also take images from everyday life, including pavilions and window panes related to the artist’s life experience. The painted form seal these objects into the two-dimensional surface in a 1:1 ratio. Unlike the “adopted” Reality series, they are grounded on the consensus and empathy of the gaze, the body, and everyday environment and translated onto the picture plane through Gao Ludi’s highly personalized visual system. As such, the acrylic works on canvas on the surrounding walls and the mixed material works on wooden panels at the center of the gallery form an intertextual and referential relationship with regards to painterliness and conception. These works explore the common visual experience and the possibility of fission and fusion in the different fields of painting, photography, digital image, sculpture and architecture, and their historical heritage.