Author: ZHANG ENLI 张恩利

Size: 175×120cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2008

Estimate:

Final Price: RMB 800,000

LITERATURE
2011 Zhang Enli / P18-19 / Shanghai Art Museum
signed in Chinese and dated 2008
EXHIBITED
2011 Zhang Enli, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai

NOTE
The item is held under the bonded status, for more details, please see the Notice on Auction of Bonded Lots.

I emphasize hiding. What I want to say is behind the painting. I don’t want to tell anyone the answer. I think painting is not an answer or a result, but a process, a fragment, a feeling, a momentary, ambiguous feeling, a smell.
──Zhang Enli

Everyday Life as Poetry
Among artists born in the 1960s, Zhang Enli is particularly passionate about observing ordinary people and everyday life, and depicting the social landscape where flesh and blood drift along the times of crackling development with gloomy colors and strong brushwork. In his early life, impressed by German Expressionism and touched by the civil culture of Shanghai, Zhang combined the two into his inner world and the external environment from his perspective. Since 2000, his themes were mainly everyday objects, such as containers, paper rolls, drain-pipes, buckets, empty bottles, etc., which were all necessary for life but often neglected. Around 2010, Zhang’s themes expanded again. As he began to focus on architectural and interior scenes, he observed the opener, macro “space” rather than concrete “objects”. Zhang’s painting not only reflects the artist’s insight into and reflection on the times, but also contains his constant care for and concern with everyday objects, life, space, and the concealed situation of human beings. We will expect to see four works by Zhang at this autumn auction, namely Smoker, Light Bulb, Water, and Decorative Wall, with a view to displaying Zhang’s artistic career of nearly thirty years.
Ordinary people like romantic couples, butchers, smokers and their ordinary lives in meat markets, bars, feasts, and dancing floors constitute the core subjects of Zhang’s works in the 1990s. By means of close observation, he noted down the changing mood, vicissi-tudes, puzzles and powerlessness of these nameless figures. Meanwhile, their perseverance, wisdom and humor were also manifested. It is widely regarded that works of this period symbolize Zhang’s first peak in creation, while Smoker is representative of the phase.
Produced in 1997, Smoker has an intentionally concealed dark background, in front of which the main figure, lighting his cigarette, stands with legs one in the front of the other, seems relaxed and natural. The texture of his clothes is very simple and the modelling is nearly two-dimensional. The influence of previous masters on the artist’s pictorial language and modelling approach can be clearly seen in this work. The composition of Smoker borrows from Édouard Manet’s masterpiece Le Joueur de Fifre but adopts a calmer and more intimate perspective, where the simple tones of the background and even the clothing bear a passing resemblance. His eyes are slightly melancholy as he gazes into the light of the cigarette spark. The stress of the day’s work only fades for a moment and then comes back like an endless darkness. The whole scene is in dark, cool tones, with only the hands and face in red, a similar, if not as intense, approach to light and shade as Caravagio’s.
In terms of painting technique, Zhang is adept at thin-coloring, which acquires a sense of texture and volume during his inexpressible interplay of line and surface, and surface and surface. In the space created by the black background, line and surface penetrate and possess each other, as if the power of darkness grows out of the flesh.
As a painter who presents the world from the perspective of everyday life, Zhang’s passion for both “objects” and “people” is consistent. Ordinary cups, lamps, ashtrays and even dustbins could become narrators on Zhang’s canvases, acquire an independent spirit, lyricalness, and singular look emerge from the average. They are not just objects in the physical sense-“They are no longer objects, but vehicles for carrying something else”, Zhang says.
In Light Bulb, painted in 2008, Zhang simply puts the luminous body straight on the brown background, as if it was a holy article submerged in a chaotic space, which occupies the center of vision. Through his unique thin-coloring method, the artist removes the physicality of the object’s contours and brings the inner perception of them onto the canvas. Though the whole work has no explicit direction in terms of content or concept, the artist’s sense of the world and the temperature of life are pouring out beneath the surface of everyday objects by virtue of turning the picture abstract and unfamiliar, which presents a salient transcendental aesthetics and philosophical taste.
In Water of 2015, the artist attempts to convey a certain playfulness embedded in the “object” through the unique medium. Through brush, hand and canvas, the artist layers translucent paint onto the canvas, give the overall color a subtle texture similar to the vagueness and translucency of gouache. The brushwork is smooth and delicate throughout, with the rapid movement of the brush adding to the rhythm of the painting as well as emphasizing the artist’s impromptu emotional intuition. Here, the brushstrokes are the language of form, build up the overlaying, superimpose spatial interconnections between them, thus create a visual illusion of depth in the spatial relationships.
In his series of architectural and interior scenes, Zhang focuses on the psychological and spiritual “space” behind everyday environments such as the peeling mosaics on walls, tiles on living room floors and building facades.
In Decorative Wall, produced in 2010, Zhang copes with the structure of the painting by simply varying the perspective lines. He spares no effort in meticulously portraying the gradations and interplays between each color block on the wall, combines the subtlety of painting and the rigorous analytical thinking in a way that is spontaneous and relaxed, yet rigorous and restrained. Here, the boundary between reality and spirituality is dissolved, and everyday objects gain a certain ineffable metaphysical value through the physical painting medium, thus a brand new psychological connotation is bestowed on them.