The Easeful Life Time
By Wang Jiang
The canvas sucked up the oil paint, and the color became increasingly gray. And dust, quietly embedded in the gap of brush strokes, can't be cleaned or wiped out, so I don't have to worry about losing it... I enjoy everything that painting brings me, it is trustworthy and makes me feel safe.
Huang Liang has a special obsession with "gray". In recent years, he has created a large number of gray-tone paintings with peaceful atmosphere, interesting and simple shapes and subtle differences in colors. Most of the themes are simple stationary objects and portraits of friends, which are painted on the back of the old canvas, with matte paint and rough texture. Careful viewers can also even detect slight creases on the surface of the works. The painting is surrounded by self-made edging, which endows the work a special sense of antiquity. All these constitute Huang Liang's painting style, revealing the temperature of human nature in every detail.
Gray color and stationary object are themes that most contemporary painters avoid, because they can't help but remind people of Giorgio Morandi, a lonely painter who has been mythologized, a painter who has made a perfect annotation for "stationary object" in his entire life. Morandi is metaphysical. Standing in front of his works, the viewer can gaze at solitude and discover seclusion, with the spirit drawn by the mystery of geometry. Today, Morandi is no longer just himself, but has become a fashion and entered the show field. When he is synonymous with elegance, he is already on the altar of mass culture.
Huang Liang is not a follower of Morandi's taste, neither does he have anything to do with the trend. On the contrary, in his creation, we perceive the deep gaze, and find the truth and concreteness hidden behind - his character, his soul and the society in which he lives mix into the special gray in his paintings.
A quiet gray tone tinted with a faint bluish green, the dramatic light reflects the objects in the space, an oil lamp is put there and the wick is not lit, with the outline obviously deformed. The curly letterless paper standing around it in a half circle shape is a psychological theater. The stationary object shows the quasi-human nature. Huang Liang gave a personal explanation to this scene - the lamp, like myself, is injured and tired. Memories of misty past events turn into letter paper which protects my heart.
For Huang Liang, "life is like a lamp" is a kind of feeling, and the alms bowl and dictionary, mussel and rosary beads, ingot and life signs in those paintings are also the lodgings of daily emotions. For most viewers, these contents are memories drifting away, even divorced from their sensory experience of stationary object paintings. Huang Liang is especially infatuated with old things, which is a character cultivated since childhood. Education makes him pursue simplicity and naturalness. To this day, he is interested in hand-made objects, and all these objects made by him have the aesthetic feeling of old objects. In this way, Huang Liang's works are not only the content of paintings, but also the aesthetic carrier of his "nostalgia for the past". Therefore, his "gray" is naturally full of this enduring sense of reality. It has a kind of magnetic field that can calm people down, full of mystery and with melancholy in mystery.
Since then, my parents have stopped giving me more goals and pressures, and their greatest expectation for me is to live a good life.
Huang Liang was misdiagnosed as lung cancer at the age of 17. The young man's heart suffered a great impact. For nearly two years, he lived under the shadow of death at any time. That time also marked the beginning of his career of art learning, and the colors he painted were grayer than him. This unique feeling came from the trauma in his heart and shadowed him to his youth. Before 2009, Huang Liang created some paintings of translated X-ray films of the lungs, which were heavy in color and emotional in brushwork. This is undoubtedly the painter's private memory and a kind of consolation for his juvenile experience. With the growth of age, time healed the trauma of his youth, and Huang Liang would no longer draw images that disturb senses. His paintings became more and more peaceful, but this linger melancholy remained in the gray in his paintings.
I have been staying in Shenyang and insisting on painting is my belief in life. We may be the last generation that have experienced the decline of Northeast China, which inevitably influenced my intuition in painting.
Huang Liang's gray is of complex composition, and the environment in which he lives also shapes his heart, which naturally affects his perspective and vision. While painting stationary objects, he also painted some portraits, in which most of the models were young friends in life. The paintings were also calm and gray in style, and the characters inside melancholy. Sometimes, his painting is only part of a face. The eyes are like a deep landscape, and the dim surface brings confusion of visual perception. The highlight in the pupil becomes the beacon in the viewer's imagination, which exists in the distance of the night scenery. This is the vision of his friends around him, and also his own vision. For decades, complex historical and social factors have led to the rapid decline of Northeast China, and Huang Liang, like these young people trapped in the place, is experiencing the constant sinking of social life. As a painter, the sentimentality brought by all this intruded into his sight and mixed with himself into his deep gray.
The gray described by the painter is the gray of the tone atmosphere, the gray of the object memory, the gray of his life experience and the gray of the background of the times. In his mind, the bright colors are fleeting, but the gray and dust can always last forever and the years are in peace.