There is an impulse to digest and adjust a material set up. I want to take in, and pass through me leaning, sheltering, pulls and torques, where one texture turns into another, how things are held in place, and structured to stay up.
I want to join in
But I can’t gulp this scene, encompass a path’s tilt, can’t eat or embrace a join between different building materials to enjoy them, be like them, do something to them. I don’t seem to have the apparatus within me. I can’t do it with my body alone. I need something – an additional appendage of substance.
Painting is used
As an appendage of substance and slim layer of the world. To get it on the surface and deal with it. To register and indicate internal and external forces, and hold them in contact. The painted surfaces, the cardboard gates, are not paintings in themselves. They become activated as part of a painting back at the gateways, in contact with that to which they respond. They do things to each other; the paint surfaced cardboard facets and the surfaces of other constructions and growths; and the action of the inserted image plane within the three dimensional, inhabited structure, across the blocking and welcoming line of the entrance. With attention to textural detail, the painted image, held temporarily in place, brings up observations about material history, how things came to be the way they are. The world as already touched, graphic, built into, grown into, used, ornamented and possessed.
‘The material world is saturated with labours, and there are many ways in which one can unspring and perceive this labour.’ Renu Bora, from ‘Outing Texture’
I remember when I was 18 or so I would go to nightclubs in Manchester and take E or acid and shadows shifting up and down the walls swans, red glass purred me to sleep candle at my mum's ornaments...
The show is a reflection of Liu Bolin's multifaceted and complex view of contemporary society and culture. The critically acclaimed and internationally renowned artist will release the first works of a new series, Hiding in California.
