Lot Essay
Luo Zhongli’s art has consistently centered on eternal themes relating to the reality of human nature and love. From his realist style of the 1980s and explorations of folk mannerism in the 1990s to his shift toward a linear style after 2000, the basic template for his canvases has remained the simple, down-to-earth sincerity of the Daba Mountain people and the circumstances of their lives. Luo's repeated elaboration of this single theme has reflected his adoption of different styles and techniques in different periods, as well as his penchant to continue deeper study before creating new works. In general, Luo refrains from deliberate portrayals of what we commonly imagine as the arduous work and hardships of rural life. Instead, the smaller aspects of more typical daily affairs become his main subject matter: the mutual support in the love between husband and wife, the affection between family members, and the romantic love between men and women, all of which induce sympathy in the viewer for Luo's painted figures. Luo's somewhat droll and jocular creative style embodies a joie de vivre that prevails despite the monotony of everyday life, revealing genuine aspects of human nature while fully expressing the tenet that 'art should be thoroughly rooted in life.'
Luo Zhongli's creative work entered a third phase after 2002. He eliminated the backgrounds and environments around his human subjects, no longer placing them in their real-life circumstances; instead, he extracted their essential images, superposing them on an abstract space composed of outward-radiating lines. Taking inspiration from the folk art of traditional Chinese culture, he simplified certain essential elements derived from the arts of clay sculpture, paper cutting, and shadow puppetry into symbolic color-line paintings. At this point he also began employing neon-bright surrealistic colors in combination with exaggerated forms, and with the addition of robust lines and original painting techniques, created a series of works with an even more avant-garde aesthetic.
Thunder Storm depicts one of Luo's favorite themes: In the midst of a sudden thunderstorm, a husband and wife huddle close together as they rush along a road seeking escape. Thunder cracks, lightning flashes; their pace is urgent as their oil lamp lights the way. Unlike his previous, more objective and realistic portrayals, in Thunder Storm Luo sets his subjects against a black background and outlines their forms in white. These white lines set off subjects, while different colors are swept across these base white pigments to create, bit by bit, a linear painting with subtly changing colors and lines of varying length. The thickness of the lines varies, but each stroke of the brush remains distinct, and each line in the pattern is unique, creating subtle and gradated change. The artist thus fully explores both the expressive, representational potential of line and its use as an abstract element. In the painted structured created by Luo's radiating lines, his subjects seem to expand outward from its center, reaching directly into the heart of the viewer's vision, for a work with great dramatic tension and explosiveness. Luo unleashes bold color and ultimate expressive tension in a break from the dark color tones with which he previously recreated the unsophisticated folk ways of country life. Through a highly experimental application of color, he creates a visual effect which fuses the two-dimensionality of painting with the three-dimensionality of sculpture, reminiscent of contemporary minimalist Dan Flavin’s installation of florescent light fixtures (Fig. 1). The cascading of splendid color within dynamic lines and the profound color tones of the background form a chiaroscuro, sending forth dazzling rays of light.
Luo Zhongli has taken the private language of life and his feeling for the people of the Daba Mountains and transformed them into a highly aesthetic, linear, and motivic painting style. Cuban surrealist Wifredo Lam achieved something similar, in a different style, imbuing the paintings of his later years with his feelings for a small village on the Italian Gulf of Genoa, which he discovered and fell in love with in 1946. Through his brush, its customs and folkways are depicted by means of abstract figures in lively colors with an emphasis on the movements of their overlapping forms (Fig. 2). Both artists simplified the depictions of their subjects into one of the basic elements of painting—line—eschewing the visual observations of naturalism and instead emphasizing a kind of totemic and primitively sculpted character as the subject of their paintings. Both apply color in a lively, spry fashion that highlights the rhythmic bodily movements of their subjects, imbuing their works with a bright, vivid atmosphere. Through their flowing, colorful lines, the fantastical images of the artists' own deep subconscious are merged with these images of human figures from the real world, and offered to viewers in this unique and exceptional mode of presentation.
Luo Zhongli's creative work entered a third phase after 2002. He eliminated the backgrounds and environments around his human subjects, no longer placing them in their real-life circumstances; instead, he extracted their essential images, superposing them on an abstract space composed of outward-radiating lines. Taking inspiration from the folk art of traditional Chinese culture, he simplified certain essential elements derived from the arts of clay sculpture, paper cutting, and shadow puppetry into symbolic color-line paintings. At this point he also began employing neon-bright surrealistic colors in combination with exaggerated forms, and with the addition of robust lines and original painting techniques, created a series of works with an even more avant-garde aesthetic.
Thunder Storm depicts one of Luo's favorite themes: In the midst of a sudden thunderstorm, a husband and wife huddle close together as they rush along a road seeking escape. Thunder cracks, lightning flashes; their pace is urgent as their oil lamp lights the way. Unlike his previous, more objective and realistic portrayals, in Thunder Storm Luo sets his subjects against a black background and outlines their forms in white. These white lines set off subjects, while different colors are swept across these base white pigments to create, bit by bit, a linear painting with subtly changing colors and lines of varying length. The thickness of the lines varies, but each stroke of the brush remains distinct, and each line in the pattern is unique, creating subtle and gradated change. The artist thus fully explores both the expressive, representational potential of line and its use as an abstract element. In the painted structured created by Luo's radiating lines, his subjects seem to expand outward from its center, reaching directly into the heart of the viewer's vision, for a work with great dramatic tension and explosiveness. Luo unleashes bold color and ultimate expressive tension in a break from the dark color tones with which he previously recreated the unsophisticated folk ways of country life. Through a highly experimental application of color, he creates a visual effect which fuses the two-dimensionality of painting with the three-dimensionality of sculpture, reminiscent of contemporary minimalist Dan Flavin’s installation of florescent light fixtures (Fig. 1). The cascading of splendid color within dynamic lines and the profound color tones of the background form a chiaroscuro, sending forth dazzling rays of light.
Luo Zhongli has taken the private language of life and his feeling for the people of the Daba Mountains and transformed them into a highly aesthetic, linear, and motivic painting style. Cuban surrealist Wifredo Lam achieved something similar, in a different style, imbuing the paintings of his later years with his feelings for a small village on the Italian Gulf of Genoa, which he discovered and fell in love with in 1946. Through his brush, its customs and folkways are depicted by means of abstract figures in lively colors with an emphasis on the movements of their overlapping forms (Fig. 2). Both artists simplified the depictions of their subjects into one of the basic elements of painting—line—eschewing the visual observations of naturalism and instead emphasizing a kind of totemic and primitively sculpted character as the subject of their paintings. Both apply color in a lively, spry fashion that highlights the rhythmic bodily movements of their subjects, imbuing their works with a bright, vivid atmosphere. Through their flowing, colorful lines, the fantastical images of the artists' own deep subconscious are merged with these images of human figures from the real world, and offered to viewers in this unique and exceptional mode of presentation.