Since arriving in France at the dawn of the new millennium, after training in painting at the Nanjing Academy of Fine Arts, LiFang (born in 1968) has developed a body of work in which the gaze is blurred in order to be better recomposed, attentive to that fragile moment when the figure unravels without disappearing entirely. Large juxtaposed areas of flat color, modulated according to variations in light, structure her compositions. Color emerges from juxtapositions, superimpositions, and outcroppings, creating an optical depth that slowly absorbs the captive eye.
In some ways, this patient work of fragmentation evokes the accelerated flow of our era, a world saturated with images where presence fades as it is exposed.
His recent paintings depict scenes of sharing and fulfillment, bodies of bathers exposed to the transparency of daylight, captured on the beach, at the water's edge, whose iridescent reflections retain the diffuse warmth of summer. His oils oscillate between lightness and gravity, between sharp contours and trembling surfaces. What matters is not so much representation as perception, this way of inhabiting the world through the gaze, of feeling it alive before it fades away. In this interval between appearance and erasure, LiFang explores the very duration of the visible, a space where clarity becomes memory, where painting, through successive afterimages, remembers.
Far from any demonstrative virtuosity, the artist engages in painting that is imbued with quest and experience, attentive to his own inner self, a painting that does not seek to reproduce reality, but to capture its movement, its fleeting brilliance, its density. Bathed in light, half-blurred faces and silhouettes hark back to the founding hours of modernity, when figuration and abstraction were explored in the same continuity of vision.
Both expansive and rhythmic, the pictorial gesture combines the rigor of drawing with the freedom of an airy, lively touch, carried by a subtly tangy, colorful vitality. For the removal of representations, or at least their conversion into apparitions, supports an interweaving of subtle associations forged around reminiscences, thus bringing about an imaginary fabric shared by all: a feeling of lightness and freedom, redeployed into infinity, dissolved into immensity. LiFang thus conjures up a generic, almost limbic memory, generating images that seem to spring from memory alone. It is a suspended moment, both intimate and shared, that we are given the opportunity to prolong—so that the summery, floating freshness of wonder may linger, if only for a moment.
- Maud de la Forterie,
journalist and art historian