ZHANG ENLI LOOKING OUTWARDS
Zhang Enli produces canvases and environmental painted installations in which the boundary between abstract and figurative is lost, thanks to a liquid, rapid method. Using the outside world as a mirror, Zhang Enli documents the more prosaic aspects of contemporary life. He regularly works with everyday objects and often magnifies his subjects until a specific fragment of a scene is depicted, as if enlarged through the viewfinder of a camera.
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A Cheerful Person is a third site-specific intervention within the Art Mapping Piemonte project. Borrowing the colours of the surrounding natural setting, Enli creates a sort of “pareidolia”, transforming the façade of the church into a smiling face, delicately blurring the architectural features of the façade with his quick brushstrokes to form a unified whole. The project began during the long period of lockdown, imagining a work of religious architecture set freely amidst the vineyards, as a happy presence capable of bringing a smile to those who encounter it. A Cheerful Person transforms geometric colour fields into an explosion of marks that pay homage to the utterly Italian tradition of “gribouillage” (scribbling) of Cy Twombly and the creativity of childhood, capable of transforming reality with the force of imagination.
His latest exhibition, ‘Looking Outwards’ showcases works from recent years at Hauser and Wirth, St.Moritz. The works on view, such as ‘A Melancholic Person’ (2019), exemplify his distinct abstract visual language. The artist’s expressive lines and curves are always underpinned by the structure of his pencil- drawn grids. Influenced by the washes of traditional Chinese brush painting, the artist dilutes his paint until it is almost like a glaze, leaving grids visible beneath the layers of paint
