Abstract
painting has become one of the hardest forms of art to produce well.
Everything from pure colouration to angry blobs, euphoric drips and
angst-ridden splatters, from conceptual blankness to minimalism, from
intellectual geometrics to cool slashes has been tried. Essentially
conjoining form, colour and texture, permutations whilst endless are
not inexhaustible.
Xu Hongmin's paintings are abstract. They deal in patterns, geometric
balance, and a narrow range of almost monochrome colour. The results
appear structural. Where some forms of abstraction deny space, Xu
Hongmin's works suggest vast, boundless plains, which aligns the paintings
with concrete realism, but leaves room for the imagination to wander.
The compositions consist of a broad, wide foreground that sweeps away
to a far horizon led by various diagonal, vaguely meandering lines
sucked upwards and into the distance. Such large spaces associate
themselves with the stone fields in the Imperial Palace, the cobbled
pathways at the Eastern Tombs, the flagstones on the city squares.
A rich underlying Chinese-ness that is not calculated but inevitable.
Xu Hongmin has worked in this style since 1993, consistently refining
it to produce a sophisticated body of work. The paintings may initially
seem flat but in the right light every mark begins to dance and lead
you on a journey. This is mesmerising in the expansive panoramic format
of later works on canvas as well as those produced on paper. Measuring
more than four metres in breadth, they are traversable like a physical
landscape. Seen free-standing, the innate sensation of motion and
stillness is made potent and offers an experience not common to our
usual experience of looking at a painting.
Xu Hongmin has also begun to explore colour. Inverting the relation
of colour - originally monochrome - to brushmark - originally multi-layered
and tightly woven together - he now concentrates on optical illusions
where two lines meet, manipulated by colour to suggest that the two
lines define a physical space. Simple, minimal and yet highly charged,
which describes the products of a complex, painstaking and disciplined
approach to art. This is Xu Hongmin's most profound achievement.
Karen Smith
