Dellupi Arte in Milan hosts, from 30 March to 20 May 2022, the first solo exhibition in the gallery by Yanyan Huang, a young Chinese artist who condenses geographies, identities and interdependent relationships, linked to his biographical history and the natural world, into an elaborate mythology .
The exhibition, which will be inaugurated on Wednesday 30 March from 15.00 to 20.00, is entitled "Silence of Time" in relation to a recent group of paintings made in Italy.
Completed in 2020, these works - all large in size - were conceived and painted by the artist during a few weeks' stay in Sicily. Taking inspiration from the island of Favignana and from the extraordinary natural and historical context of Cala Rossa, the "Silence of Time" cycle is configured as a narration developed on several canvases, according to a delicate and harmonious visual vocabulary.
"All the silent stories of the island - declares Yanyan Huang - have been indelibly engraved on its rocky facade, in its bowels and now on my canvases".
«Working in residence in a Sicilian villa on the sea - writes Nicole Kaack - Huang has reversed his usual practice, drawing from his environment rather than creating one. [...] Uniformly abstract, Huang's series "Silence of Time", 2020, nevertheless evokes aspects of landscape and figuration. [...] By completing eighteen paintings and twenty-eight drawings in just twenty-one days, the works become a catalog of the artist's hours and moods, recording a life in the play of acrylic and ink, counting the minutes between each new iteration of now. For Huang, they are filled with the smells and sounds of memory. For the viewer, they suggest a remote and beautiful place, but, like the rock paintings of Levanzo, they keep their secrets, evocative but silent »..
The exhibition will include a dozen works, which together will determine a sort of inner landscape of the artist. The musical interweaving of the lines, combined with the use of light shades of color, creates airy and floating compositions, alluding to spiritual atmospheres and personal memories..
The calligraphic approach is one of the elements that most characterizes Huang's poetics. Calligraphic strokes, gestural signs, swirls of color form sensual and poetic compositions, which refer to oriental calligraphy but also to baroque decoration. These features are revealed in the preference for curved lines and sinuous spiral patterns, motifs that intertwine with each other until they merge..
The predominant colors are those of the natural world, often suggestions coming from the Mediterranean scrub in which the artist was immersed during the production of the paintings. The encounter with the Sicilian landscape, the discovery of the past of the places, the cultural exchange and the reworking of stories and mythologies are the spark of Huang's creative universe.
"Silence of Time" is also, as the title suggests, a reflection on the notion of Time, understood as an entropic succession of moments of existence, captured in the immediacy of the present and visually constructed according to intertwining gestures and lines.
Born in Sichuan (China) in 1988, but raised in America, Yanyan Huang lives in New York, Los Angeles and Beijing. Constantly balanced between East and West, his practice also includes works on paper, ceramics, fabrics and performances; the innumerable sources of inspiration of his work are the starting point for a multidisciplinary approach that is outlined in a variety of expressive results.
Along with the canvases, there will also be a selection of works on paper by the "Tempo (Exile)" group, also performed in 2020, where the lyrical and calligraphic sign appears freer and more intimate.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the first monograph dedicated to the artist will be published, which will include all the works of the pictorial cycle, accompanied by a critical text by Nicole Kaack.