自在

Tao Yi

Curator: Sun Dongdong

OPENING : 2015.12.20  3: 00PM

Venue : D06 798 Main 2ndStreet，798 Art Zone，No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road ,Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

EASE(Zi Zai)

By Sun Dongdong

Tao Yi now seems to be a painterbeyond the trends and he is also among the few painters who create “abstract”painting. We can notice neither the current materiality, the concept of timenor the visually dizzy illusion. Compared to those concepts, Tao Yi stillremains “abstract” at the spiritual level.

Here “spirit” does not mean metaphysics,instead it is the intrinsic sense of order in the forms, which is not a newdiscovery, since we can experience that from the paintings of Malevich andRothko. As a successor, although Tao Yi chose the same values, he does notinherit from the predecessors. Because “spirit” actually is a kind of feelingthat can’t be carried forward. Malevich clearly drew the logics of paintingtowards “nothing” for freedom, which reflected the optimism about future ofhuman beings. Compared to Malevich, when we look directly at Rothko’s colorfield painting in large size, it seems that we are confronting a dense fog,with some color blocks shimmering, with the ambiguous and soft boundaries ofcolor fields. Once you get immersed in it, hardly can you passthrough-----Rothko did create a space where meditation is inspired, whether hispainting was a response to the tragedy of human beings or not. On the contrary,Tao Yi’s abstract painting is very little involved with fields; his practice iscloser to the geometric composition of Malevich. The “Siddhartha” series arepaintings in small size, 47cm in height and 57cm in width.

All of them sharethe same format segmentation. They are all horizontally divided into three rectangles:the lower one occupies almost half of the format, and two upper rectangles arein the same size and the uppermost is vertically divided into two halves.Generally speaking, the bilaterally symmetric composition tends to be visuallyinflexible. However, we can appreciate the stability from Tao Yi’s painting, nomatter the size or the three-segment of the format, he has managed to translatethis stability into sublime----Much like a regulation, he deduces the logicsamong color blocks in this stable structure, and he ponders over freedom underthe confined rules. As the name “Siddhartha” implies, Buddha, the man ofpractice has self-enlightened, Tao Yi has repeatedly built up inherency forevery painting----independence, self-evidence and serenity. This finallyreaches a state of ease(Zi Zai), where there is no historical aggressivenessand where the specific emotions have been transcended. Malevich once said “...ablissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into the ‘desert’,where nothing is real except feeling...” For Tao Yi, this feeling does not lead to “nothingness”, but to theconstruction of innermost being.