Ying Li: Recent Paintings
The Painting Center
52 Greene Street
New York NY 10013
212 343 1060
February 3-28, 2004
By JOHN
GOODRICH
Ying Li Montecastello
Sky Series #2 2003
oil on canvas, 14 x 17 inches
photos courtesy the author
Painting is as old as, well,
the hills around Lascaux or Altamira-and yet painters are still finding
ways of challenging our expectations. When we walk into a gallery today,
we're liable to be struck by the curiousness of an image and by original
ideas about processes and roles of painting. We might even encounter
a couple things that seem to have preoccupied those 30,000 year-old
cave painters: a delight in the materials of painting and its language
of forms.
The current exhibition of work by Ying Li at the Painting Center reminds
us why these virtues have endured so long. These eighteen landscapes,
with their thick encrustations of oil paint, turgid colors, and lashing
strokes, positively exude an enthusiasm for paint's sheer materiality.
(Having visited the artist's studio a number of times over the years,
I can attest to the splatters of pigment covering walls, ceiling and
floor. By way of disclosure I should also mention my ownership of an
earlier Li painting.) Li's furious reworking of shapes and all-over
kneading of surfaces suggests something of Pollock's wing-and-a-prayer
attack: the self-regenerating, free-fall meditation that hangs all hope
on the moment and the complete banishment of PRE-meditation. Indeed,
after a few moments with Li's livid hues and violent, contrary strokes,
Pollock's sweeping gestures can seem almost MELLOW.
Expressive as it is, though, the vivid paint-handling serves as just
a conveyance for other, perhaps more interesting, impulses. Li's eagerness
to sling paint belies a subtler, simultaneous purpose that on the surface
(no pun intended) may seem strangely at odds with painterly abandon.
As a representational painter, she builds complex connections towards
elements of nature, and with her solid grasp of pictorial forms she
imparts in her best paintings an emphatic sense of size, weight, location,
role-that is, PRESENCE-to the elements of her images.
Sounds old-fashioned? Li certainly uses the motifs and material of a
traditional artist, but she employs them with rare verve and honesty.
If an illustrator communicates a likeness through referencing details
(two eyes, a nose, and a mouth make a face), then a painter organizes
more primitive sensations to re-create an optical event (a shadowed
recess, a projection into light, a declining plane give weight to the
impression of a face under a particular illumination.) Li PAINTS the
landscape, and does so without any kind of safety net. Her contours
form an almost brutal spatial framework for the actions of her color,
and within it her hues, jostling forwards and back in space, link in
forceful sequences across the canvas. The effect can be felt at its
most basic level in a painting like the tiny "Montecastello, Sky
Series #2," in which a small hut plays a large and distinct role:
its rectangular side (practically a single swipe of vivacious ochre)
is pressed to the canvas' lower edge by its dense green roof; above,
the 80 percent of the canvas that is sky flows out luxuriantly in a
sea of blues ranging from cerulean to traces of ultramarine. The weights
of colors provide the timing of these events-the placing, the holding,
then the release-so that this one or two square feet of canvas brims
with the sensation of vast space.
Ying Li Montecastello
Sky Series #4 2003
oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches
Colors and blunt drawing collaborate again to animate the entirely different
space of "Riverstroke #2". In this forest scene, furious green-blue
scribbles emphatically locate a softly lit plane (a distant field?)
behind taut verticals of trees which, as they rise, trap bits of sky
against the canvas' upper corners. Once more the audacity of attack
startles. There's clearly no preconception of composition; all rests
on a visual response and the possibility of making pictorial sense of
a hundred sensations.
In the more complex "Vermont, Deep Fall," an irregular, hour-glassed
shape of dull cerulean blue, hemmed in by contrasting patches of brown-green
and greenish-ochre, stares back from a remote but insistent location
in the mid-distance. It doesn't take imagination-only an active engagement
in the painting's rhythms-to see that this is a river receding between
banks of overlapping walls of foliage. The frontal towering of the foreground
tree, the contraction of the banks kneeling at the river's far side,
the water lithely slipping in-between, joining near and far: Li's formal
arrangements of these loaded events is every bit as vital as her violent
brushwork. (Intriguingly, the "realistic" touches-the sky's
perforations of a tree's canopy-compete with fantastic ones-the grayish-yellow-green
patch somehow residing comfortably in the sky-all of which only shows
that the connecting impulse of good painting is not literalism but pictorial
coherence.)
One might suspect that for Li the paint-slinging technique is indispensable
for a focusing of intention, but for the viewer it's more like a conspicuous
raising of the stakes, one that risks uneven results but also makes
triumphs like these all the sweeter. Not every painting in the exhibition
in fact has the impact of "Vermont, Deep Fall" with its powerful
particularizing of forms. At times Li's gestures convey the urge to
come to grips with the subject more than they actually illuminate it.
But considering that this is a characteristic of a great deal of expressionist
painting (the Neo-expressionists who came to fame in the 80s are especially
good at showing more grasping than grasp), this is the occasional shortfall
one gladly accepts in view of the intensity and bravery of the work
here. And brave it consistently is, pressing the bounds of technique,
of motif (with images ranging from immense panoramas to close-ups of
water), and fashion (who else would dare paint-sincerely-a waterfall
in 2004?)
The impulse of a good artist is always a generous one, and ultimately
it's to share a memorable visual event. Ying Li's paintings at the Painting
Center offer just such a gift. They are visions of vigorous abandon,
and the attendant truths-purely visual ones-that are her hard-bitten
prize.
see
David Cohen's review of the same show
