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WANG QIANG
王强
OPTICAL GAMES IN A LIMTED FREEDOM
有限自由里的视觉游戏
Date of the Show: March 8th – April 20th , 2008
展览时间： 2008年3月8日－ 4月20日
Opening: March 8th , 5-7pm
展览开幕式：3月8日， 下午5－7点
Venue: Marella Gallery
地点：玛蕊乐画廊
OPTICAL GAMES IN A LIMITED FREEDOM
"Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?"
If we take into analyses the paintings of the series Limited Freedom, we could place Wang Qiang among those few artists that undertake a rigid geometrical abstraction. Already within the title, the artist reclaims the concept of freedom that, also in the West between the beginning of the Twentieth Century and the end of the Second World War, had ratified the birth of Abstractism.
Abstractism, as a universal language, is in fact free from any kind of ties with reality and from any attempts with figuration. Wang Qiang, as abstracters did in their times, deprives painting of the realism bestowing it with the faculty of the word and turning it into a tool to express the subjectivity of the artist and a place for the visual immersion of the spectator.
In the Athens of the IV B.C, Platone had already written something about painting: "for what concern the beauty of the shapes, I don't think about what most people could imagine, for example beautiful painted bodies. I rather mean the straight line or the circle, the plane and solid figures, designed with the ruler and the SQUADRA. I believe these figures are themselves very beautiful, because they transmit a particular pleasure".
But what kind of pleasure could we ever find in the mess of colors and in the overlapping of lines?
The artist refuses to give the spectator interpretational hints and his canvases become just a simple pretext for contemplation because, as Leonardo in the Fifth Century pointed out, "messy and indefinite things stimulate the spirit to new inventions". Hence, the meditative quality conferred by a meticulously maniacal geometry is undoubted!
The figurative "emptiness" of Wang Qiang's canvases confers full scope to the feelings and emotions of the observer who carries out a somewhat mystical submersion in the colors letting his retina being confused by the chromatic cheats and optical games created by the lines.These works enclose the intrinsic value of recalling only themselves just like the masterpieces of the Op Art (Optical Art) anticipated in the Thirties by Victor Vasarely. Through the linear variations (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) and the contrasts of colors, he experiments the effects of optical stimulation and the false impression of movement that has been created.
However, for which reason is this "freedom""limited"? Only approaching the canvases, we can comprehend the mock and amusement of these artworks: the patterns are prefixed and they already exist, and the newly painted part is only partial. The canvases are already colored and printed with the lines and motifs of which, only in some portion of the space, the artist inverts and upsets the direction, creating with the brush geometries of geometries and making these labyrinths even more complex.
Illusions and mirages recall to the structures of a computer or to the trajectories of a video game to which the artist confers a three-dimensional form with his installations. Complex architectures emerge from the polystyrene to create intricate buildings behind whose slants and niches are placed, hidden, small figures: animals, characters of comics and strange beings that seem to be part of a different universe. It seems a futuristic and science fictional scenery, a world inspired by cartoons that once again submerge the viewer in a surreal dimension deprived of time and space.
Eleonora Battiston
有限自由的视觉游戏
"谁害怕红, 蓝, 白？"
如果从「有限的自由」系列创作中分析，王强可说是少数几位敢於挑战几何抽象的艺术家之一。如同文章标题已经阐释，艺术家如今重新诉求於自由的概念，这自由的概念曾促使抽象主义诞生於20世纪初和第二次世界大战结束间的西方社会。抽象主义像是一种共同语言，它能解开任何现实绳索及开放任何形象的尝试。如同其他抽象艺术家曾为他们的时代所作过的，王强剥除绘画的现实性并赋予它表述功能，使它变为一种表达艺术家主观的工具，同时，也成为观赏者视觉上的洗礼之地。
在公元前第五世纪时期的雅典，柏拉图写下了对绘画的思考："谈到关於形状的美感，多数人想到的可能是被画出的美丽肉体，但我不这样认为，我更认同的形状美感，应该是那些用标尺和方形框框所设计出来的直线或圆圈及平面和立体图形。我相信这些图像本身已经十分美丽，因为他们传达出一种精确独特的愉悦感受"。
但在混乱的颜色和重叠的线条中，我们能够发现什麼样的乐趣呢？艺术家拒绝提供观赏者解读的线索，他的画作仅仅是让人可以静观默想的单纯藉口，就像是列奥纳多•达•芬奇（Leonardo）在第五世纪中所指出，"混乱和不确定的事物能够激发出创新发明的精神".无庸置疑，精确的狂乱几何赋予了冥想的质量。
王强作品中形象化的"空虚"留给观赏者充分感受的空间，让观赏者被一种神秘的色彩淹没，他们的视网膜被彩色欺骗而迷惑，他们进行著由线条创造的视觉游戏 。這些作品包含著由自身索引發的內在價值，如同1930年代欧普艺术大师维克托•瓦萨雷里（Victor Vasarely）的开创作品。通过线性变化（纵向，横向和对角线）和对比的色彩，王强对於视觉刺激作用的影响的实验和產生错觉的运动已经建立了。
然而，什麼原因造成了这样的"自由"是 "有限"的呢? 只有走近画作，我们才可以领略这些艺术作品的嘲弄和娱乐：图案式样是预先放置在画布上的，他们早已存在，而新画的一部分只是局部的延伸。画布上已先上色并印上线条，而在这空间中的某一部分，艺术家从倒置及弄翻的方向创造出几何形式的绘画风格，同时，也让这些迷宫的线条和主题更加复杂。艺术家将幻觉和海市蜃楼以 立体形式的装置作品呈现，让人联想起计算机的结构，或是计算机游戏中的轨道。由聚苯乙烯產生的合成建筑结构，打造出错综复杂的建筑物，这些建筑物的后方有著斜坡和壁龛、隐蔽的小塑像：动物、漫画人物和古怪的生物，这些看起来似乎属於另一个宇宙。这个看似未来派和科学虚构的风景，这个从卡通啟发的世界，再次让观赏者沉浸在一个剥离了时间和空间的超现实次元中。
叶兰
Marella Gallery 玛蕊乐画廊
4 Jiuxianqiao Rd., 798 Art District, Beijing
北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路4号798艺术区
www.marellabeijing.com
8610-6433 4055
Marella Gallery Beijing
Wang Qiang
《边角料·世界》
《unused material·The World》
200×50×260 cm
Marella Gallery Beijing
Wang Qiang
《有限的自由07—6》
《Limited Freedom07—6》
125×125cm
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