A shiver goes through
The human, WANG Yu's essential subject - but which "human" are we dealing with? Which Homo Sapiens exactly? To unravel the nature of the subject, let's add up the various stylistic elements that characterize the artist's "grammar". These are: 1, a focus on the human figure; 2, a friendly, sympathetic, anti-expressionist and non-doloristic treatment of the body; 3, an indexing of the diversity of our behaviors; 4, a suspicion of the "weight of the world"; 5, the hypothesis of a derangement or wandering, at times, of our behaviors. The sum total of this combination expresses a questioning view of human reality, both contemporary and immemorial. Something in humanity, of humanity, is wavering. WANG Yu's work is an echo of this, quick to reflect our fragility and the uncertainty of our destinies. But never in a pessimistic way. Because that's the way it is.
Does an inner earthquake vibrate beneath the sober beauty of this creation? The human being is exposed for the occasion. The beautiful skin that is smoothed here? Let's bet it's not a shell. WANG Yu's humanity deserves to be in the world, and we still look at it with wonder. A shiver of doubt about its quality, however, runs down our spine like a zephyr, given its half-fig, half-raisin presentation. We're gripped by a sweet confusion. Before the storm arrives?
Paul Ardenne is a writer and art historian.
His books include L'Image-Corps. Figures de l'humain dans l'art du XXe siècle and Art, le présent (éditions du Regard).
Saying more: frames, sculpture
Finally, let us note, recently in the artist's career, the appearance of frames, which WANG Yu fixes around his paintings, plus the creation of sculptures.
The frames, to begin with. These are not the equivalent of an ordinary frame. A painting evoking the recent confinement linked to the Coronavirus sees the human subject represented enclosed in the frame of a real glass window, as if held prisoner. When such other painting, also evoking, in filigree, the confinement and the obligation to close oneself, represents a human subject surrounded by a frame made of cinder blocks, some of the latter, above his head, badly joined and risking to collapse.
As for the artist's sculptures, they again cultivate originality. The Statue of the new Liberty that the artist signs, a double-faced harpy, evokes a humanity that has hybridized, animated, lost perhaps, lost in the course of our ecological moment "anthropocene", blurring the landmarks and hierarchies of the living and the symbolic. A similar impulse to shake the viewer is detected when the artist represents the sculpted portrait of a young man with the features of a young Napoleon (or of the French president Emmanuel Macron?) under the title Intelligence guiding the people. His thick hair adopts the shape of a brain where animal bodies and claws can be recognized while his youthful head tilts on the sculpture's base, like a tumbler. Humanity in loss of identity, of relevant representation, of foundation?
WANG Yu - Ange sur trottoir, 2022 - Oil and acrylic medium on canvas, burnt wood, 102x70x9cm
WANG Yu - Jeune talent, 2022 - Oil, sand and acrylic medium on canvas, wood, foam and shells. 118x100x8cm,
Signifying the human condition
What else can be noted in the register of style? Most often, WANG Yu presents the human body in a nudity of the beginning of the world, first, original: an avowed way of going to the essential, of starting again from the state of nature. Tightening on the corporality and, allusively, on the being. No background, the background of each painting is white, which is logical: this human being, delivered in its elementarity over the course of the paintings, is embodied first as an archetype or stereotype.
Each body painted by WANG Yu equals a definition of the human. This is confirmed by the artist's classification of his paintings into series: The strong, The wooden heads, The angry, The retro, The others... There is only one human species, certainly. On the other hand, there are many characters, many inflections to our existential courses, many choices of life and many fatalities too. The body, the bodies such as the artist represents them, here climbing the Moon, in not very careful explorers, there thoughtful in front of a stretch of water, other part devouring with appetite tongues of fire... index the human condition in its turns and detours, between dreaming, audacity and ordinary moments of the existence. Their vocation: to give figure to the variety, to our becoming in the course of the living and the time.
W A N G Y U
L'HUMANITE A DECOUVERT, EN DOUCEUR
S O L O S H O W
WANG Yu - L’intelligence guidant le peuple, 2023 - Porcelain, H 23cm.,
A specific figuration (aesthetics of transfer)
The human being according to WANG Yu is universal. The artist insists on this, in his own way: by giving him the appearance of a recurring character, somewhat always the same whatever his sex and whatever he does, whether he is making love (The carnal ones), praying (The kneeling ones) or meditating (Meditation), variously. This effect of universality emanates in WANG Yu from a systematized standardization, which makes his "style". The human body "in general" that the artist offers to our eyes plays here with advantage of its carnal envelope, of the most original and therefore, of the most recognizable: its skin is not pink but almost, not yellow but almost, not transparent but almost, not silky but almost. Color and visual texture of the epidermis of these painted bodies, developed with a specialized American company, came about after several years of research. In May 2007, WANG Yu abandons "current pictorial techniques", launches "into a process of research of a flesh which seems palpable, which "lives" on the canvas" and composes "a translucent brilliant and soft matter". "To dig into the nature of the human mystery and represent it as I feel it," she says.
This mixture of colored matter, which resembles varnish and acrylic medium, and which makes the envelope of its figures is, at the request of the artist, refined by the firm Golden Artists Colors, which prepares at its request a specific and unpublished Skin Tone Medium created to measure: "After a year of research of texture, color and brightness, a representation of a palpable flesh appears thus on canvas: soft, translucent, satin-glossy, thick and alive. For what sensitive and intellectual effect? We, spectators, identify ourselves well with the bodies painted by the artist. Their difference does not intrigue us less. This impression prevails: these bodies, all at once, are us and are not us. Yes, these bodies there, on the canvas, are not expressly our real bodies but they are not less the plastic transfer, the decalcomania, the quotation. We will learn from them, consequently. The effect of distancing that they generate makes the allegory "work" at its best.
Text by Paul Ardenne //
WANG YU, Humanity uncovered, softly.
Because he is human, the artist speaks about the human. This tautological appreciation, once formulated, does not prevent this thorny question, unavoidable: to speak about the human being, that's fine, but how, with which arguments, by resorting to which plastic forms and especially, with which credibility? WANG Yu, a Chinese painter living and working in France (her studio is in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris), has the human body as her constant model. In an obsessive way: all her paintings expose it, and her rarest sculptures in the same way, in a never thunderous but recurrent way. A major subject, for this artist, that this one. The focal point of her art.
An artist at grips with our lives
The images of the human body that WANG Yu inscribes in her paintings are more light than serious. Schematized, identifiable by its amiable appearance, represented isolated in the frame, the human body is represented in her paintings in a clear dominant. It displays a luminous face and a plastic without contortion. As the artist paints it, it is neither realistic nor idealist: no photographic effect, and no impulse to celebrate a superlative beauty. It always expresses, on the other hand, a proven poetic opening, following the example of the human figures of a Jean-Michel Folon, with the slightly shifted physiognomy. This kind figure, perhaps, knows the doubt but then without undergoing it in the tearing.
WANG Yu - Homme, Femme, 2018 (detail) - Oil and acrylic medium on canvas. 65 x 81 cm + 65 x 81 cm