Painting is bound to shine again soon the light of wisdom. Some critics declared its death in the seventies and eighties. While shocking their statement was nevertheless right on the mark. Art has indeed lost the societal functionality that has driven it from its early beginnings till sometime after the 2nd World War or over 99.9% of its time-span. Art has indeed always been instrumental at defusing the wisdom of the men of knowledge at the attention of all. Societies need cohesion to survive and, having a far deeper impact on humans than words and theories, visual signs imposed themselves as privileged instruments of that communication. Nowadays ever increasing pace of scientific changes and globalization impose themselves in a vacuum of accepted values which results in a deep shock and a strong need for sensical answers from new visual signs. This book is about a coming Renaissance in painting that will be driven as an answer to that societal need.
From the Author
My personal approach towards painting and more generally towards visual arts is somehow the result of the many influences that I underwent along my life. But more particularly, it is the result of the gigantic shock between: - my understanding and practice of European modernism. - my discovery of Chinese philosophy and of Chinese visual arts.
t took me all the years between 1986 and 2000 to digest that cultural shock. It's difficult to lay out in a few words the impact of such a shock. I had already experienced 2 earlier cultural shocks through immigration and than through education but nothing compares with the immersion of a young European in the daily Chinese realities for a period of 15 years.
Along that uneven road, I have experienced the need to go back to my received ideas they were indeed not satisfying me any longer.
Two fields absorbed my interest and all my time: - the formation of capitalism because modernity is ultimately nothing more than one stage of development along its history. - the build-up of culture and the formation of civilizations and more particularly the history of the Chinese civilization and the content and formation of its value system.
After fifteen years of extensive reading my ideas were starting to come together and I felt the time had come for me to try my hands at painting again.
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