Author: MAO YAN 毛焰

Size: 75×55cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2013

Estimate:

Final Price: RMB 1,000,000

LITERATURE
2014 Skin’s Literary Form-Mao Yan / P47 / The Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts
signed in Initial and dated 2013
EXHIBITED
2014 Skin’s Literary Form-He Duoling and Mao Yan Double Solo Exhibition, The Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, Nanjing
2018 Mao Yan & Han Dong, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing

Deeply Rooted “Portrait of the Soul”
Mao Yan is well respected for his transcendent gift and unique painting language in the sphere of Chinese contemporary art. Portraits have always been the vehicle for Mao Yan to voice ideas and thoughts. From mysterious faces and subtle expressions, the viewer can strongly perceive “a kind of wonderful authenticity that goes beyond objective reality.” The scholar Wang Min’an once commented that: “Mao Yan construes a person as a person with insight, a person full of rich inherence, and a person with a soul. Mao Yan attempts to make these souls immortal, a self-monument of souls on his paintings.”
Mao Yan’s early works are mostly based on his bosom friends living in Nanjing, such as Su Tong, Han Dong, and Li Xiaoshan, express the melancholy and sensitivity shared by young people in that era. Since 1999, Mao Yan went through a new stage of creation that lasted for over 20 years. Through exquisite and lifelike portrayal, he gained metaphysical insight, transcended the time and space environment and the characteristics of the times, and revealed a universal vista of the ethos of the times and the human psyche.
In Portrait of the Man produced in 2012, the painter focuses on the character’s face while ignores the insignificant details such as clothes and background. The man in the painting looks at the viewer squarely, his eyes show a look of being surprised and puzzled. Through a gray tone that is difficult to comprehend, the painter makes full use of the relationship between cold and warm, light and dark, and void and solid in the painting, so that the character has a lifelike effect of being illusory and blurred. In this state when the spirit frees itself from the body, the inner world and mental state of the character are laid bare before the viewer. It is quiet and clear, sensual and rational.
El Greco created in 2013 depicts Greco, a master painter and the pioneer of Spanish classical paintings. The painter uses the classic angle and shows the face from a three-quarter view. In the stable triangular composition, the bust of the character almost occupies the entire painting. The figure looks out of the painting with sharp and sensitiue eyes, and becomes the visual focus of the painting. For Mao Yan, he does not pursue the real representation of the external body of the character, but values the spirituality conveyed by the painting. The painter sketches the outline of the character with the fast and fluid brushstrokes. The face is more vivid in the gray background, as if each small brushstroke is a nerve terminal, shows anxiety, doubt and pulsating heartbeat in the mottled environment. The concise colors and the side angles chosen by the painter highlight the facial features of the character, and present the character’s rich emotion and complex inner world on the canvas. What’s more interesting, this painting can also be viewed as the understanding and imagination of a painter or a genius to another painter or genius. In the process of creation, a meeting of spirit that goes beyond time and space seems to have been solidified on the canvas.