The origin of the world Painting

Emmanuel Lincot French Art Critic TO PAINT NOT BEING BUT PASSING Li Chevalier has brought novelty to a genre that has fascinated great modern and contemporary Western artists for generations. Of course, Franz Kline, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, David Hockney, Henri Michaux, and more recently, Pierre Alechinsky, spring to mind. While these artists found some of their applications/techniques in Chinese art, within the ambivalence of possibilities that the use of ink, at the crossroads between image and writing, offers, Chinese artists themselves, beginning last century, developed in depth reflection, sometimes questioning the legitimacy of a secular and learned art form. This reality was particularly put to the test on the Chinese continent during the prolonged period stretching from the 1911 revolution to the very brutal Maoist fracture, a period that rejected as a whole all forms of learned art and power, considered to be the main cause of China’s decadence and of its subjection to imperial powers. Despite obvious borrowing from the West throughout the century, and the ruptures this brought about, Chinese art, and particularly art involving ink, best sums up the entire current era, which we feel is truly pivotal. This is the period that best guarantees continuity, with transition acquiring the greatest density and tradition “shedding its skin”. The artist Li Chevalier is indisputably one of its most illustrious representatives. Within the space her works open up and the sinuosity of the ink’s lines, a reality conceived as an ongoing process unwinds and becomes legible. It will never be said enough, upon observing Li Chevalier’s monumental realizations, that this painted oeuvre is totally in tune with the notion of breathing. In addition to the required open mindedness, Li Chevalier proves her perfect mastery of the brush and pays tribute to her prolonged studies. They necessarily involved philosophical reflection, and studying the great classics of Chinese art – Bada Shanren (八大山人) and Shitao (石涛-) – as well as empathy with two recently deceased masters, whose paths were also linked to France: Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-chun. An idea, it will be understood, not of rupture for Li Chevalier, but of transformation within her choice – nowadays a rare one among Chinese painters - of privileging filiation as an abstraction . Although it remains open to criteria outside its own tradition, ink painting still preserves its essential spontaneity, born of a gesture reflecting the dynamism of the universe. Intention suffices for an expressive mode that seeks neither work nor ability. Action has its own effect, following the way of the entire universe, whereby the primal simplicity of nameless action can be born. This affirmation of a set of values that are inscribed within the natural order, helps us perceive the particular direction taken by an entire civilizational context, which Laozi,(老子) in the Daode jing,(道德经) , coins in the following manner: « The Tao achieves (wei为 ) everything without acting (wuwei无为 » (Chapter 37). “He who studies accumulates a little more every day, whereas he who practices the Tao eliminates from day to day; through elimination, one attains absence of action. There is nothing that non-action cannot accomplish. Taking hold of the world must be achieved without action…” (chapter 48). This ideal of spontaneity, of regained juvenility, often implies a refusal of too much skill, a Taoist criterion that implies the absence of all artifice. Freshness is acquired through work - it is not an a priori gift, it must be sought after. Li Chevalier gives precedence to the blackness of the ink and the whiteness of her media. Ink contains all colors. It is the matrix of all possibilities. Shui Mo Hua 水墨画 (“ink/paint”) in Chinese is, in an explicit way, a homophony of a key notion in learned thought, translated as « silence transformation ». It is up to us to discern in the complexity of these moving forms, a coherence that - by way of affinity networks - goes beyond the contradictions of our existences. Li Chevalier’s painting hardly says anything else. And nevertheless, it says everything… Coming and going, retracting-expanding, dispersion-concentration, latent-manifest: the regularity of this ongoing process in which we all take part constitutes a horizon of absolute certainty. The art of Li Chevalier espouses a form of random lyricism. At the same time, it follows a series of secular Chinese pictorial rules that appear relatively simple, but are in fact very complex in their utilization: open/closed(开/合), tightly knit/spread out (疏/宻), empty/full (虚/实), far/near (近/远), high/low (高/低), dry/humid (湿/干), light/dark (淡/浓), brush/ink (笔/墨) . Thus, art is experienced as a path open to change and to the eye, both ours and the painter’s, moving to and fro in an exchange that is cultivated over time. Beginning-end… Perhaps that is what Rome represents in this artist’s career. The ultimate stage before she redeploys her art toward paths that escape the univocity of meaning. Paths we love to get lost along, because no one keeps any trace of them, or even less so, remembers their name. Those paths which, in the later Heidegger’s language, “lead nowhere…”.

Painting:Ink on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:59.1 W x 59.1 H x 2.4 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.