Long Quan 2022 — Tabula Rasa Gallery

Water Under the Bridge
Long Quan
Exhibition: 05 Nov - 17 Dec, 2022, extended to 07 Jnauary, 2023
Beijing

The solo exhibition of artist Long Quan “Water Under the Bridge” is now open at our Beijing space. This exhibition focuses on the artist's recent paintings about nature and the relationship between humans and nature. A sober melancholic inwardness prevails most of Long’s paintings, standing in a detached neutrality and avoiding any idyllic sentiment. He tends to be extremely rational and rigorous in his painting process; his meticulous attention to form and his careful manipulation of overall structure make it take a long time to produce a painting, manifesting the repetitive layering and demanding labours involved.

In the course of his artistic research, the tranquil landscape of the South Pole in which Long Quan immersed himself during his travel in December 2011 was like a revelation for him. Long was struck by an ineffaceable impression of the calmness, solitude and magic of nature’s light there. Nature gets a new grandeur in Long’s Antarctic landscapes, yet this never involves any menace by the sublimity.

The sense of vigour and calmness give the artist’s later landscape paintings a new presence,a minimalist, even naiveté, expression. His use ofrestrained brushstrokes and colorsattempt to capture the ephemeral, even elusive state between movement and stillness in nature. In Long’s paintings, mountains, rocks, trees, water waves and clouds grow naturally in a slow manner, dissolving the inescapable immediacy that otherwise lives in our relationship to images and delivering a calm dignity in a lucid merging of closeness with remoteness.When these distinct subjects are placed together, a sense of time that mixes history and reality, eternity and chance, and a figure of artist working at ease in his unhurried process of painting, all startto emerge in his composition.

About the Artist
Long Quan (b. 1956, Chongqing, China) received a BA and MA from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China. Most recently, he has presented solo exhibitions at Tabula Rasa Galleryin Beijing, James Fuentes Gallery in New York, and YIMA Gallery in Chengdu. His work has been included in group exhibitions at National Art Museum of China, To d a y A r t M u s e u m , a n d Capital Museum in Beijing. Longhas served as a professor and Vice Chair at the Department of Painting at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and as Chair of the School of New Media Art and Design, Beihang University, Beijing.