AIKE DELLARCO is delighted to present Tang Dixin's solo show which is the first occasion to offer an overview of his recent radical painting practice in China.
Tang Dixin’s video and performance works often attempt to develop rules through his own physical and mental experience in order to create a perception that individual tends to fall into a state of invalidness within the public sphere. Rather than casting light on such individual invalidness, his paintings are more inclined to delineate the liberation of personal emotions. His paintings are both realistic and abstract. When social and historical traces are erased, each individual man is no longer taken for granted as the subject of the work. Instead, bodies that have been disassembled and then rearranged highlight the sense of materiality of man, as a collective. At this point, the “materiality” as well as the interplay between the “materials” becomes the central part of Tang Dixin’s paintings.
His painting features a sense of “concrete abstraction”, which means that you can easily recognize the contents of the images (i.e. the limbs, structure and landscape); but in the meantime it also radiates power of imagination. Rather than recreating a specific event, the artist aims to create a surrealistic scene that is fictional and beyond reproduction. Rough strokes of bright orange and blue are largely blended with the greyish chaos as the background. The images are fragmented, obscure, deviated, ambiguous, univocal and discordant. During the process of the pursuing the ideal and concrete state of abstraction, Tang Dixin manages to create a boundless vacuum zone that is teeming with contradictions and infinity.
