Gallery 1618 made the audacious decision to bet on young up and coming artists who all are seeking something. Until the 2nd of October you could discover the work of Chinese painter Di Kexin.

　　Does realism have a future in painting? This is the question that Di Kexin tries to answer. Whatever the case, he sees himself as part of a "particular group of individuals who persevere on the road to realistic paintings…" This is a noble endeavour, but what are they striving to achieve? Numerous artists have decided to walk this path: Li Wentao, Chen Yifei, Lai Yuan, Ai Xuan, and Zhou Lixuan, the list goes on. Is this a new trend in contemporary art or a comeback of the realist movement? The questions are numerous. To get a better view of what is at stake, let us focus on the work of Di.

　　Paintings that are both distant and familiar

　　The scenes immerse us in a temporal and spatial elsewhere, half real, half legendary. Beings from a bygone age are posing in vast, primal and faraway environments; sometimes the backdrop is nothing more than a monochromatic curtain. It can be landscape or nothingness. In King's garden (2016), the artist paints the sunlight and its diffusion in space, which fades away the contours of the landscape. The perspective is aerial, the scenery is mysterious! We have the feeling of noticing Turner around the corner. This long haired Chinese king, wearing a golden chain, a red costume, all luxury, takes us back to a faraway time. Standing behind a thick rock, the weight of his head resting on his hand, he looks bored. He dreams and lets time fly along with his thoughts like a kid staring out of the window. Like him, we are lost. A majestic Mulan, a dreaming king, a noble warrior… Di Kexin's work is full of figures from a different era, glorious but bygone. He also paints more contemporary figures, but even then, they still seem at odds with their time. All in all, his paintings look distant, like a dream of all the possibilities, hazy and foreign. A trip for the spectator in the beautiful lands of the artist's imagination.

　　The feminine figure in his work is a chameleon. She dumbfounds us. Omnipresent and polymorphic, she is simultaneously a war heroine, an empress and a Christian nun. She is portrayed as a goddess of time, crossing the ages. A Dorian Gray who does not rot from the inside. Human or mythological, elusive, with a thousand faces, with unflinching rectitude, she escapes our grasp. Some works even manage to produce a sense of mysticism from a single detail: a levitating rose, a petal rain… In other works, the artist plays with time, both brief and long-winded, in an attempt to fracture it. Thus, more than a transcending imitation of Running Bride (2007) by the Norwegian painter of evil, Odd Nerdum, Respiration (2018) captures a woman breathing in: nostrils, lungs and chest all inflate at once. A new metamorphosis of Zeus penetrates her without her knowing, causing her body to feel an intense but fleeting pleasure. Other paintings, on the other hand, present her in a longer time frame: that of a pose, a prayer, of waiting. This mirrors our reality, where time stretches when in contemplation and reflection, and contracts in moments of disinterest. Playing with Chronos is another benefit of realist paintings.

　　Strangely enough, at times these paintings seem weirdly familiar. Upon closer inspection we notice that this familiarity does not stem from the scenes or subjects presented to us, but from the technique and sometimes from the numerous references to Occidental culture. In a painting entitled The story about artist (2015), we can see a suspended painting reminiscent to that of the Arnolfini Portrait (1434) by Jan Van Eyck. In another painting, the composition can remind us of Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656). Di imitates the masters' innovations with originality. Regarding the technique, we are not used to seeing Chinese figures represented realistically with an oil paint. This technique is associated with the Occident, while Chinese art usually evokes ink paintings and a sense of restraint, even though these techniques were introduced by Castiglione under the Qing at the start of the XVIIIth century, and were revisited under the Republic (1912-1949) and the Popular Republic of China (1949-present day).  I think of Xu Beihong, of the social realist painters, of scar art… Contemporary paintings decided to use these techniques to present new subject matters.

　　Back and forth between fantasy and reality

　　"It is likely that being born in northern China, in the blistering cold and without the poetical charm of the south, enabled me to gain a frank and virile personality, which informs the serious, solemn and heroic personalities of the characters in my work", said Di Kexin.

　　In The muse sisters (2018), two women stare at us intently. The one on the left is wearing a radiant red dress, looking like a stork of fire; the one on the right an elegant black dress, looking like a panther of the night. Their feet on the side, back straight, head high like two noble sphinxes, they form an ascending pyramid, which clashes with the linear background, empty, misty and primal. Through this balance of power, the artist creates a dynamic. The painting is perfect. The sun sets behind, but the faces are lit by a persistent light, like a television spotlight in Caravaggio's style. The scene is dramatized. In short, all of this makes a mythology, a super-idealisation. The canvases' composition, the treatment of characters, colour and lighting are all elements which confer these young ladies the image of muse sisters, of silent princesses, of ghosts from ancient times, part goddesses, part tragic heroines. The distance with these chimerical beings represented in a primal landscape, similar to Leonardo da Vinci's, plunges us in a utopian elsewhere. These are characters with "serious, solemn and heroic personalities" to quote Di Kexin, with a cold and earthly charm. A dreamy world, inhabited by smooth faced people with strong personalities and charisma is presented to us.

　　But this artist's originality does not reside in the themes of realistic and ideal paintings. It resides in the confrontation between the extreme idealisation of an ancient world and the social hyperrealism of the contemporary world. It is this clash, initially dumbfounding, which shapes the art of Di Kexin. This exhibit is centred on the concept of the "ideal country", but it is by looking at his body of work as a whole that we can fully understand his interesting stance. The darker side of some paintings, less ideal and looking more like a realistic social document, interrogates us. The disillusion, boredom and emptiness of these beings, devoid of any glory or transcendence, clash with the majority of paintings present in the gallery. This disillusionment and this apparent fatigue manifest themselves in the very materiality of the paint.

　　On one hand, we have a brutish style, grainy, pasty, less slick, more expressive, which grasps our attention. I think of his beautiful yet sorrowful self-portraits, from which erupts his inner life and reality. In his Self-portrait (2017), the artist stares at us, frankly and brutally, no restraint, no plan to seduce us, he is weak, but sure of himself. He says something with his expression only. The stare is dark, with bags under his eyes, tears wanting to pour. It's a painting about disillusion and truth. He is a being torn apart, touched and tired, who unveils himself in front of us and touches us. He is a guy who's been skinned alive, and whom we want to help out.

　　On the other hand, we have a quasi-photo realistic style, informative, carrying a narrative. These are every-day scenes presented in all their banality, but paradoxically, they are pleasing to the eyes. I think of these scenes of work at sea. In Hope (2016), Di Kexin paints the beauty of manual effort, the conditions and peacefulness of life. That's a painting in all of the pure realism of XIXth century painters like Millet and Breton. There is no attempt to idealise or enhance: faces are red, clothes are sandy, and bodies are normal. No aesthetical canon. And yet, these Chinese fishermen are noble and beautiful because they are human, profoundly human. They are so real and close to us. These scenes, some may disdain them, but Di persists in their representation. They are social. Figurative art can show us the reality of the world, seen and felt by an individual. What is certain is that between allegories and workers, this artist finds an in-between both poetical and original.

　　Di Kexin is a contemporary counter-artist. He rehabilitates old European traditions, even though he is a stranger to these lands: oil painting, pictorial realism, art genres, questions of beauty and harmony. All of these elements that have been questioned - if not destroyed - by contemporary art throughout the years are being put back in the spotlight. With his figurative paintings, he takes us to a temporal and spatial trip in the past or in the present, with glorious characters or daily life people, in China or in Italy. He gives us his own vision of the world and society. He questions the past and traditions for drawing the future. Some will say a lack of modernity. They often say that about many artists. But this is the challenge Di Kexin wants to tackle: the renewal of realistic painting.

To be continued.

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