Li Donglu — Surimpression — A2Z Art Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: July 11 → August 9, 2015

A nature, a ruin, organic elements taken from the torrent of images suffered by this Chinese- born artist. While that stream seems frenetic to us, Li Donglu does not live and perceive the time scale as ordinary people.

Severely tested, our senses are appealed to all the time, thus diluting the intensity of every moment. Accustomed to a bulimia of pictures which we intend to replay, we are now only able to appreciate the moment through our screens. We archive our memories too quickly without taking the time to live them again through the lens of our impressions. An image replaces the other, superimposes itself onto the other.

Like a meditating monk seeing all the pictures bombarded all day long in various media whirling around him, Li Donglu opens his eyes and takes these afterimages that he combines with various outstanding current events. He superimposes them, mixes them, and thus creates his enigmatic pieces. The oil, which requires an incompressible time to dry, represents a decompression chamber, allowing time for reflection. The artist gives this nebulous aspect to his works in order to suck the viewer into his surimpressions, as if trying to freeze this fleeting time.

The question is knowing if we should continue to follow this frenetic pace, to consume all the images that finally escape us and become only distant memories, despite the immediacy of the event.

For this new exhibition, Li Donglu explores visions that lead us into a timelessness which bears witness to his qualms, these fragments of souls. His art is meditative, even therapeutic for some, but the proposed topics bear the scars of an education conditioned to always consume more and more, faster and faster, until exhaustion, until destruction … It is up to us to follow the path of the artist and to find our bearings in this space-time, a second breath, a glimmer of hope …