Moving Stones Gathers No Moss

"The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun"                     — Honoré de Balzac  

“…and I circle ten thousand years long;  

and I still don’t know if I’m a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song.”   — Rainer Maria Rilke 

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Composed of works by three artists, whose approaches differ as they overlap, this exhibition  aims to emphasise and articulate an often lost sensitivity in today’s fast-paced, hurried society.  Both metaphorically and visually, it is that sense of letting the invisible, yet tangibly experienced  aspects, to gain form that drives the respective practices of these artists.  

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The gap, and hence the tension, between conventionally accepted meanings and  introspectively non-verbal nature of creation opens a question of how much (or how little)  evocation is required for that ephemeral to be communicated and to manifest in a shared  space? Not only towards the public, but perhaps even more urgently in between and among the  works themselves? To point one’s finger right between "there is" and "there is not," — presence  and absence — while giving priority to none. Both hazy and yet distinct, "at once light and dark”,  one emerges from within the other.  

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Is it between present and absent, sensed and known, that the bridge can fleetingly emerge yet, in  fact, not to be sustained?  

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‘Once Belonged to the Same Forest’, a pair of park-found branches transformed by Yiwen Liu carry their natural memory and organic essence while simultaneously acting as a vessel of  human actions — rough (cut) and subtle (colour) — reflecting and balancing these in equal  measure. Linked by a subtle hues of the painter’s palette, both her paintings and objects draw  from a deeply felt sense of subjective quietude which opens a broad space for contemplation  and point to one’s changing condition.

 

Suggesting yet another kind of fragility and ephemerality is the piece ‘Tears’ by Rene Lazovy.  Solemnly taking their shape after enlarged raindrops falling through the Earth’s atmosphere, this  work is standing on crossroads and/or moving into multiple directions: a clear reference to  Alexander Calder, yet distinctively stripped of colour, it is also informed by the artist’s research  into hyperobjects, an idea articulated by the ecology-oriented philosophy of Timothy Morton.  

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Exploring painting as a conjured territory of perceptual ambiguities, Jan Valik’s work balances  alchemical spontaneity with certain control in an effort to reach from subjective towards  something universal. Held in evocative tensions between depicting and concealing, these semi abstract ecosystems or atmospherically fluid spaces are influenced by ideas of painting’s  parallels and contradictions to psychology, the subjectivity of emotions, landscape and quantum  physics (particularly the idea of superposition).

 

Text by Jan Valik 

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