Hua Gallery is pleased to host the exhibition of Abstract Chinese artist Le Guo. His exhibition presents to the audience intense visions of colour, organic forms and undefined shapes, exploring the concept of transformation and suspension within visual space.

Le Guo’s paintings reveal to the audience intense visions of colour, organic forms and undefined shapes. Bearing influences by both Western Expressionism and Surrealism, as well as by Chinese philosophies and classical art, his work is triggered by a continuous dialogue between physical and emotional, conscious and unconscious, internal and external. Interested in investigating the variability of space and the endless possibilities it provides, Le Guo explores the painting’s surface and delves into its multiple layers of depth. His work is the result of a natural process in which the artist is part of the creation but the creation is also spontaneously generating itself out of the artist’s intentions.

Le Guo’s art does not aim to fix a precise concept, and nor does it intend to provide the viewer with a final image. On the contrary his works offer a multitude of visions, in which mutability permeates the canvas and continuously originates new forms. The artist’s way of painting is also dynamic and varied. In a both instinctive and meditated gestural body movement Le Guo penetrates his canvas with layers of colours. Sometimes he uses brush, sometimes parts of his own body. Other times it is only through subtle movements of the paper that pigments spread all over the space, thus giving rise to the artwork. In any case it is an internal rhythm, reminiscent of either calligraphy or Tai Ji Quan, which leads his creation.

Conveying a sense of performance, the artist’s dynamic movements match with the fluidity of colours, ink and water. Nothing is still. Everything shifts. Various elements appear in the shape of a fluctuating vision; they are suspended and floating within space. Le Guo’s art exudes a sense of inner liveliness, defined in Chinese as qiyun shengdong 气韵生动1. In fact, his works seem to be continuously pulsing and, whilst absorbing the viewer within their all-embracing depth, they also invite him/her to contemplate and question moments of suspensions.

“My painting process involves an intuitive application of gestural brushstrokes of coloured materials onto a material surface in response to the internal images, thoughts and feelings aroused by my experiences of the flux and tensions between conflicting and balanced opposites in the external world. Memories of my personal experiences of this external world consciously and unconsciously guide the process by which I unconceal potential forms in the materials constituting one of my paintings as actual forms in this artwork. These actualised potential forms frequently become concealed again by the unconcealing of other potential forms as actual forms while this painting is being made.

I momentarily suspend a painting not in order to encourage a spectator to assign fixed narratives and meanings to this image, but instead to encourage this spectator to imagine an unfixed process where potential forms become actualised and then frequently potentialised again. As with a natural formation like a piece of jade, each of my paintings therefore envisages a momentary suspension of an unfixed process of actualising potentiality and potentialising actuality to which a spectator’s imagination can attribute new narratives, meanings and life each time they look at this painting. The textural and colour qualities of the materials in one of my paintings not only constitute its subject matter; but also impose similar qualities on the elements and atmospheric space of this painting that encourages a spectator to see this artificial image as a synthetic whole rather than as an art object to be analysed into parts.” - Le Guo

Text by Dagmar Carnevale Lavezzoli