“ONE NIGHT IN FLORENCE” | QIAN WU

Through the title that introduces the exhibition, the young painter Qian Wu , a guest in Florence for the first time, proposes an immersion in the rereading of the verses of the great Chinese poet Xu Zhimo, who in June 1925, from the slopes of the Apennine mountains overlooking the valley of Florence, wrote the homonymous lyric in one go, giving voice to a young woman whose lover would leave her before dawn: “You have awakened my sleep and given me back my innocence / How could I know that the sky is high and the grass is green without you?”

It is difficult to grasp the linguistic subtleties in the translation from Chinese to another language which, however faithful and literal, would not be able to render the nuances and gradations of the Chinese idiom, which transfers the ideogram into a visual metaphor. Perhaps it is in this spirit that Qian Wu chooses One night in Florence , a true and proper whisper on the three salient moments of passion: the fear of tomorrow, the sharing of the evoked death and finally the final separation. The hidden meaning of the lover who waits for the "iron tree to bloom" escapes a Westerner, meaning that this will never happen. The best approach is a visual reading of the individual words, in search of their evocative power. Similarly, approaching the painting of the artist Qian Wu can take on the value of a literary experience: a visual poetry that opens to those eyes that know how to rediscover innocence, paraphrasing the lyric of Xu Zhimo.

The exhibition suggests an immersive and purely abstract journey, in reminders of openness, energy, vitality. Using a mix of oil and green and white acrylic resins on canvas, flat layers and vibrant frottage effects, the young Chinese artist chooses large/medium formats, in the rigor of a serial palette , which compared to the previous works – dominantly black, then electric blue -, now release the new dominant green. From the cosmic sky to the vibration of ferns and conifers : not so much through a green evocative of quiet, but rather a bright green, in which interlocking white beams open up, splitting the space of the canvas, building articulated grids, like breaches of light that filter between treetops.

For an emerging artist of Chinese origins and a curriculum of American studies like Qian Wu, born in 1991, the scene on which to affirm his research can only develop from the dialogue East-West, of course an East and a West as they originally appear to the gaze of his generation. In the presentation of the personal exhibition held last summer at the 3812Gallery in London , Wu wrote: “ My three aesthetic pursuits are: first, Easternism; second, poetic aesthetics; and third, the spirit of literati painting”, thus claiming the oriental heritage, in grateful debt towards the traditional Chinese brush painting called “literati painting”.

Nevertheless, the legacy of North American abstraction constitutes for Wu a fertile source of comparison, in the wake of those artists who use the grids of geometry in tight compositions, capable of establishing a sort of magnetic field.

The great masters of European informal art also come to mind: among all Hans Hartung and his “ Rayonnements”, where it is the graffiti that lets the luminous tones underneath emerge; similarly the deconstructions of the French group Support/Surface; or Gerhardt Richter – “my hero” –, whose ability to evoke space by letting the autonomy of the materials and their expressive potential prevail, is loved by the young Chinese artist.

Developing these multiple traces, in Wu's works the pictorial surface is crossed by white lines of force that create a dilated space, using textures worked with barely perceptible variations in thickness. The attraction for the large dimension is expressed in compositions in which the traditional hierarchical order is contradicted, according to which there is a center, a base, a summit. Every corner of the canvas is as important as what resides in the center, so much so that the viewer's eye is pushed to travel through the work without focusing attention on any of its parts. The painting turns out to be a real environment in which to immerse oneself.

In a long interview conducted by the writer Mark Bloch and published in the New York magazine “WhiteHot Magazine of Contemporary Art” in July 2019, Wu states: " I don't care about anything else – motion, power, energy.” The interview discusses the roots of abstraction and the developments expressed in oriental arts, where everything is abstract, as is calligraphy. In this sense, Qian Wu's research path fits into the path of contemporary abstractionism and its evolution through kinetic and luminous suggestions, refined sensorial perceptions. Yet this research, entirely contemporary and of a markedly international nature, appears to us in its own way to be a direct descendant of the ancient Six Principles of Chinese Painting, established by Xie He in the distant 5th century, where the elements that qualify a painting were defined: the “resonance of the spirit”, in reference to the flow of energy that the work emanates; the quality of the texture; the "correspondence with the chosen form", in terms of lines and shapes, as well as in terms of color, in its values and tones.

Thus, the historical present pushes the young man to question the meaning of being a contemporary Chinese artist, an integrated element of a global system, and at the same time an expression of the values of the ancient civilization of origin.

And the monologue from One night in Florence comes to mind , where with literary grace and fervent imagination, the poet becomes emotional as he thinks back in his mind's eye to places where "the sound of the wind rustling in the white poplar above" vibrates and "the refreshing breeze of the olive grove carries the fragrance of pomegranate flowers".

Claudio Rock