Wang Qiang :: Essay
Optical Games In A Limited Freedom :: Eleonora Battiston
“Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?”
If we take into analyses the paintings of the series Limited Freedom, we could place Wang Qiang among those few artists that undertake a rigid geometrical abstraction. Already within the title, the artist reclaims the concept of freedom that, also in the West between the beginning of the Twentieth Century and the end of the Second World War, had ratified the birth of Abstractism. Abstractism, as a universal language, is in fact free from any kind of ties with reality and from any attempts with figuration. Wang Qiang, as abstracters did in their times, deprives painting of the realism bestowing it with the faculty of the word and turning it into a tool to express the subjectivity of the artist and a place for the visual immersion of the spectator.
In the Athens of the IV B.C, Platone had already written something about painting: "for what concern the beauty of the shapes, I don't think about what most people could imagine, for example beautiful painted bodies. I rather mean the straight line or the circle, the plane and solid figures, designed with the ruler and the SQUADRA. I believe these figures are themselves very beautiful, because they transmit a particular pleasure".
Complex architectures emerge from the polystyrene to create intricate buildings behind whose slants and niches are placed, hidden, small figures...
Eleonora Battiston
The figurative "emptiness" of Wang Qiang's canvases confers full scope to the feelings and emotions of the observer who carries out a somewhat mystical submersion in the colors letting his retina being confused by the chromatic cheats and optical games created by the lines.These works enclose the intrinsic value of recalling only themselves just like the masterpieces of the Op Art (Optical Art) anticipated in the Thirties by Victor Vasarely. Through the linear variations (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) and the contrasts of colors, he experiments the effects of optical stimulation and the false impression of movement that has been created.
However, for which reason is this "freedom""limited"? Only approaching the canvases, we can comprehend the mock and amusement of these artworks: the patterns are prefixed and they already exist, and the newly painted part is only partial. The canvases are already colored and printed with the lines and motifs of which, only in some portion of the space, the artist inverts and upsets the direction, creating with the brush geometries of geometries and making these labyrinths even more complex.
Illusions and mirages recall to the structures of a computer or to the trajectories of a video game to which the artist confers a three-dimensional form with his installations. Complex architectures emerge from the polystyrene to create intricate buildings behind whose slants and niches are placed, hidden, small figures: animals, characters of comics and strange beings that seem to be part of a different universe. It seems a futuristic and science fictional scenery, a world inspired by cartoons that once again submerge the viewer in a surreal dimension deprived of time and space.