The Geng’s All Here | “Hysterical,” one of the works on display in Sub-Sur-Face, demonstrates Yan Geng’s blend of abstraction and portraiture.
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This week takes Jill and Mandy back to the University of Alberta’s FAB Gallery, to take in Yan Geng’s master’s thesis exhibition .
Mandy: The work in Geng’s show was very reminiscent of some other work we’ve been seeing lately. His paintings are built out of colourful abstract grounds that he coerces into suggestions of figures, heads, faces, or portraits. This relationship between abstraction and figuration is one that I’m really interested in, and I’m very excited to see work by artists who are investigating this form of representation.
Jill: It reminded us of Cynthia Fuhrer’s exhibit in the Fringe Gallery a couple of months ago. However, Geng’s show feels a bit more worked-up and conclusive to me. My first impression of the show — and I doubt anyone else will have a different one — is that there is a lot of colour going on.
Mandy: Yes, very much so. I recall you not enjoying the amount of colour all that much. But this is a painting exhibition, after all; shouldn’t we expect some pigment celebration? Geng’s trying to deal with the psychological representation of the human experience through painting. And one of the strongest visual tools to accomplish that is colour.
Jill: I like colour as much as the next person, but I think there comes a time when there is such a thing as a little too much colour. In this case, perhaps some careful editing of the pieces themselves — maybe including half a dozen or so fewer paintings — would have allowed the show to breathe a bit more, so that the effect wasn’t that of an all-over colour pattern. The paintings are so close together that their strong internal colour senses compete with one another as well as the exhibit itself.
Mandy: There was quite a lot of work on display, that’s for sure. But okay, besides the keyed-up palette, what did you think of what Geng presents us with? The abstract grounds he creates as an acrylic base worked best for me when they really emphasized texture. And I found I was much more engaged with the work where it felt like he was finding the “face” shape eventually, through more of a process. Sometimes the heads become too ... would “outlined” be the word? When this happens, the connection between that textured ground and the surrounding oil paint separates, and the image starts to function on a more simplistic level.
Jill: Here’s where I can agree with you. I do appreciate, however, that Geng was attempting to endow the figurative aspect of his work with due importance, even though they still come off as highly abstract. It’s clearly important to him that the shape of the face be at the forefront of his work; my sense is that it functions as a ground for his colour and textural investigations — his paintings will always relate back to the portrait, as long as that face shape is included. But I agree with you: the more integrated ones are far more successful.
Mandy: Another pretty important aspect of how each individual piece functions is scale — he really experiments with the size of these heads and the size of the supports. We see what happens to the figure when they are just a little smaller than life-size on a huge support, compared to having that same size of support taken up completely with the face shape — and all the possible combinations in between.
Jill: Does this take away from what Geng is doing or add to it? I think it’s interesting that he’s attempting different compositions with the face shape. But I also found it a little bit distracting to see the face shape became more prominent than some of the really excellent painting going on.
Mandy: For the purpose of this exhibition, maybe it didn’t work as well as it would have in a larger space. It goes back to what you were saying about having too much work creating a kind of all-over effect. It’s harder to concentrate on one particular image when so much visual information is happening around it. But it’s definitely good to see Geng experimenting with these kinds of things; what he works towards will be all the stronger for it.
will be on exhibit at the FAB Gallery until Feb. 14.
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