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Lot Essay
"After Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme, Op Art and kinetic art, new figurative art, minimal art and Arte PoveraK in the midst of these wild and fascinating searchings in a world which has been brought alive by science, I like to find myself in front of a painting by LalanK I forget everything else and let myself go towards this poetry of yesterday, of today and, I hopeK of tomorrow."
- René Drouin
At the end of World War II, artists from around the world flocked to Paris as the city began to rebuild itself as the art capital of the world. A young Lalan arrived from China in 1948 with her then-husband Zao Wou-Ki at the height of the Art Informel and the Abstraction Lyrique movement. The couple moved into a small studio in Montparnasse and quickly immersed themselves in the bubbling post-war Parisian art scene, becoming close friends with Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu, Sam Francis, and Vieira da Silva. While it was not until 1957 that Lalan began her career as a painter, it came naturally to her as an extension of her creative practice as a modern dancer and electronic music composer. Lalan's early works were dark lyrical abstractions rendered in thick impasto and rhythmic brushwork that recalled elements of Chinese calligraphy. She once said that she had found herself "K unable to live without painting," after her divorce from Zao Wou-Ki, whose painting career she was deeply involved with during the years of their marriage.
The 1970s marked a major turning point in Lalan's oeuvre, which saw a shift from abstraction to figuration. Student demonstrations in 1968 and the increasingly popular view of abstraction as an elitist, individualistic form of art caused Lalan to stop painting in order to reassess her own practice. As other artists moved towards Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme, she immersed herself in the study of Chinese landscape painting and Taoist philosophy. It was not until a year later that Lalan began to paint again, this time with a renewed vision to communicate "tenderness rather than aggression" and to "give out a message of peace and freedom." This idea manifested itself in a lighter colour palette, thin layers of paint, and calm, controlled brushwork. Frequently, these paintings were displayed alongside a modern dance performance set to electronic music that she had composed, forming an integrated artwork, which she referred to as 'spectacle performances'.
Painted in 1972, Paysages Lointains (Distant Landscapes) (Lot 155)exudes the quiet tranquility characteristic of this period in Lalan's oeuvre. Awash with coalescing pale blue and white tones, the triptych is punctuated by wisps of dancing grey lines that hint at the topography of a distant landscape. For Lalan, the colour white was "powerful but ambiguousK fluid, luminous, but also somber." The horizontal movement of lines across the triptych further accentuates the horizontal orientation of the composition, much like the scroll format of Chinese landscape painting. Lalan usually painted on the ground in the tradition of classical Chinese painting, which also engaged a physicality that she was inherently attuned to from her background in dance. The unembellished canvas and the translucent layers of paint form a sense of infiniteness, while the grey arabesque lines suggesting mountains allow the viewer to access the contemplative space of the painting. The work acts not as a window into another world but rather as an object to access the internal world-its lines invite the viewer to traverse the psychological landscape. As Lanlan expressed in her poem, "There is no distance neither far nor near There is no duration of time The beginning is the end time is frozenK"
Paysages Lointains is an articulation of Lalan's original voice, occupying the poetic space between abstraction and figuration, interior and exterior, dream and reality. Here painting breaks free from the boundaries of time, space, and medium.
- René Drouin
At the end of World War II, artists from around the world flocked to Paris as the city began to rebuild itself as the art capital of the world. A young Lalan arrived from China in 1948 with her then-husband Zao Wou-Ki at the height of the Art Informel and the Abstraction Lyrique movement. The couple moved into a small studio in Montparnasse and quickly immersed themselves in the bubbling post-war Parisian art scene, becoming close friends with Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu, Sam Francis, and Vieira da Silva. While it was not until 1957 that Lalan began her career as a painter, it came naturally to her as an extension of her creative practice as a modern dancer and electronic music composer. Lalan's early works were dark lyrical abstractions rendered in thick impasto and rhythmic brushwork that recalled elements of Chinese calligraphy. She once said that she had found herself "K unable to live without painting," after her divorce from Zao Wou-Ki, whose painting career she was deeply involved with during the years of their marriage.
The 1970s marked a major turning point in Lalan's oeuvre, which saw a shift from abstraction to figuration. Student demonstrations in 1968 and the increasingly popular view of abstraction as an elitist, individualistic form of art caused Lalan to stop painting in order to reassess her own practice. As other artists moved towards Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme, she immersed herself in the study of Chinese landscape painting and Taoist philosophy. It was not until a year later that Lalan began to paint again, this time with a renewed vision to communicate "tenderness rather than aggression" and to "give out a message of peace and freedom." This idea manifested itself in a lighter colour palette, thin layers of paint, and calm, controlled brushwork. Frequently, these paintings were displayed alongside a modern dance performance set to electronic music that she had composed, forming an integrated artwork, which she referred to as 'spectacle performances'.
Painted in 1972, Paysages Lointains (Distant Landscapes) (Lot 155)exudes the quiet tranquility characteristic of this period in Lalan's oeuvre. Awash with coalescing pale blue and white tones, the triptych is punctuated by wisps of dancing grey lines that hint at the topography of a distant landscape. For Lalan, the colour white was "powerful but ambiguousK fluid, luminous, but also somber." The horizontal movement of lines across the triptych further accentuates the horizontal orientation of the composition, much like the scroll format of Chinese landscape painting. Lalan usually painted on the ground in the tradition of classical Chinese painting, which also engaged a physicality that she was inherently attuned to from her background in dance. The unembellished canvas and the translucent layers of paint form a sense of infiniteness, while the grey arabesque lines suggesting mountains allow the viewer to access the contemplative space of the painting. The work acts not as a window into another world but rather as an object to access the internal world-its lines invite the viewer to traverse the psychological landscape. As Lanlan expressed in her poem, "There is no distance neither far nor near There is no duration of time The beginning is the end time is frozenK"
Paysages Lointains is an articulation of Lalan's original voice, occupying the poetic space between abstraction and figuration, interior and exterior, dream and reality. Here painting breaks free from the boundaries of time, space, and medium.