From trace to emptiness, a practice of subtraction

Jipeng Ke returns to ODRADEK for a new exhibition using the Chinese complementarity of action and non-action.
Since 2010, Jipeng Ke tirelessly traces horizontal lines which, by a continuous and discontinuous application of brush strokes, combine and associate time and space. He accumulates these lines by overlapping them and allowing them to correspond, transparent to each other. Thus emerges a ritual or a life-process that blends layers of diluted white and black colors.
Everything happens as if the hand at work no longer needed to draw legible and identifiable signs. It just mingles the white and the black as it puts in dialogue the full and the empty. The codified burden of our language thus disappears to the benefit of a meditative act to which we are invited to participate in a contemplative way.

The act of painting is simple, extremely simple, but in doing so, it takes part in the millennial Chinese culture in order to reveal its emptiness. The painted line, associated with the gesture of the wrist takes off from the blank canvas and has no limit. The lines repeat that the act of painting is associated with time and space in order to contribute to their aesthetic embodiment. This endless same humble and open gesture to the infinite is speaking to us. It associates us with a meditative understanding of time in becoming. Time that we can now interpret according to the paths of our own gaze that “empties” and returns to the white page.

As a result, Jipeng Ke appears as a Buddhist painter looking for the most abstract expression of the brush stroke. With the actions of his hands, he adds up temporal moments while subtracting by non-action all elements that limit his gesture. For the accomplished artist, the performing act of painting develops in two different and nevertheless associated ways of action and non-action, which are also addition and subtraction.

He now leads us to a different understanding of accumulation, a vain embodiment of time.
Since Jipeng Ke uses diluted paint, the white mingles with the black or combines with it, just as the addition becomes subtraction. It is no longer a matter of understanding the artist’s work in a reasonable way, but rather as a ritual celebrating an inalienable part of infinity.