Xi Zhang’s paintings in the solo exhibition “Metallic Leaf Garden” at Greymatter Gallery are large pieces that address big ideas about the human condition. The Chinese-born artist, currently residing in Milwaukee, takes inspiration from true life and symbolic experiences in an expressionistic and psychologically probing series.
An expanse of yellow provides the field for Monster. It is indeed a field, where a young girl stands alone in a pink dress. Nature is decorated in a Van Gogh-esque manner. Flowers and stalks seem happily taken by a riffling breeze, at odds with the somber face of the girl. Her features are softened nearly to the point of indistinctness. As the artist explained, it is a painting about child abuse, the interior pain of the girl remaining separate and unseen. The largely monochromatic world around her, bright though it is, is a narrowly colored world in which little else apart from trauma is felt. For all its lushness on the outside, her world closes in, condensed to a single note.
Dear Heather is a phrase familiar to Leonard Cohen fans, as is the figure in the foreground of Zhang’s painting of the same name. His representation of Cohen stands silently with a crooked mouth and eyes shaded by a fedora. The front of his suit is overrun by a splayed explosion of burnt sienna color. He sports a red necktie, picking up on the red dress of a woman framed by a window in the distance. The atmospheric background is filled with golden clouds, radiant but uneasy as though tinged by a storm, contrasting with a wall bruised by purple and brown. It is a painting about unrequited desire, the distance between the two visual and emotionally.
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Metallic Leaf Garden is a compact show that yields a rich viewing experience. Zhang’s artistic technique is invigorating as his drawn-out brushstrokes are at times densely loaded, while in other passages, thinned paint drips in rivulets, hedging away from the illusion of landscapes and people. Far from being merely surface exercises, varied emotional conditions emerge through this combination of process and narrative suggestion.
The exhibition continues through Aug. 29 at Greymatter Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo St., second floor.