Light

An illumination!

For his third residency in Brussels and second exhibition in our galleries in Ixelles, Jipeng Ke returns with works on canvas and paper. In dialogue with Roby Comblain, Gérald Dederen, Aline Forçain, Anne Marie Finné and Nathalie van de Walle in “Landscape-wood”, the Chinese artist presents “Tree”, an acrylic on canvas work that highlights the interplay of light and shadow.

The appearance of light in these latest works is also apparent on the paper, whose texture makes it easy to absorb the light passing through the lines he continues to trace tirelessly.

In a completely different series, Jipeng Ke’s focus on the sun’s rays on vegetation leads him to use color to let the light filter through. The density of the foliage allows only a few rays of light to penetrate, attracting our gaze and allowing us to experience a brightening.

In his solo show at ODRADEK in Saint-Gilles, the artist is exhibiting works created during the long period of confinement.  Isolated in his studio, he felt the comforting presence of the trees around him. Moved and attracted by their company, Jipeng Ke, who abandoned figurative art long ago, brings their presence to life through his horizontal lines. A few shapes emerge from this pictorial device, testifying to the inalienable existence of the surrounding world.

However, Jipeng Ke has not renounced abstraction, nor the aesthetic prerogatives of the scholars. In traditional Chinese painting, the scholarly ideals value personal expression through the codes of scholarly erudition more than the display of technical abilities in representation.  In line with those ideals, Jipeng Ke is not trying to “represent” the trees from his neighborhood. On the contrary, he pursues a quest, addressing the inner essence or inner spirit of what he perceives.  What he expresses on canvas or paper is a revelation of what he sees. There is a correspondence between himself and those trees, which produces an image. It is the expression of the relation between himself and the encountered other .

If we can draw a parallel with the painting practices of the most inspired scholars, we can also relate Jipeng Ke to the Western phenomenological approach.  Thus, on both sides, it is the intentionality of the perceiver that is at work in the encounter, or even union, with the given. Touched by the light casting the shadows of trees or appearing in foliage, the artist imagines what is given to him. He then becomes more and more attentive to the way things appear to him, that is, to their “way” of appearing.

The passage of light also invites us to consider the temporality of day and night, as well as that of the seasons. Its role is to give life and form to what surrounds us, therefore Jipeng Ke summons it without ever wanting to reduce or channel it. He prefers to work with light while remaining uncertain, to watch out for the otherness of all things and free his imagination. That’s why the artist only delivers simplified landscapes revealing their intensity.

Translated by Renaat Beheydt