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Académie Conti, Domain de la Romanée Conti estate in Vosne-Romanée.
Open every Sunday and on appointment: +33 3 80 68 45 55Closed Sunday 18 August
28 April – 1 September 2024Curated by Franck Gautherot & Seungduk KimThe Académie Conti, a collaborative project between the Consortium Museum and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, presents Chinese artist Xie Fan's first institutional exhibition in Europe Various Fires. Curated by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim of the Consortium Museum, this exhibition is on view from 27 April to 1 September 2024.
Only the word 'Small' is missing from the exhibition title for it to echo a tribute to Ed Ruscha and his now legendary series of small books that capture photographs of situations, landscapes, and objects taken at the turn of the 1960s.
This exhibition features three series of Xie's small terracotta paintings, ranging from the size of a postcard to that of an LP. Created specifically for the show, the most recent paintings depict hopping fires—Flames—on very dark backgrounds—campfires, bonfires, yellow flames. The other two series comprise five Golden Sea on one side of the exhibition space and more than ten Celestial Signs, including the Cloud series, on the other.
Learn more on The Consortium Museum's websiteArtist: Xie Fan -
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Xie Fan carries with him a pictorial shyness that makes his strength in this very paradox of limited subjects and modesty of vocabulary. Reshuffled cards do not piece together the magical tarot that would be welcome in an esoteric narrative situation. To hell with all that, and fortunately, no need for more than the truth of faded colours absorbed in the porosity of unpolished terracotta.Well below the virtuosity of Indian miniatures, Xie Fan’s art disturbs many certainties about the supposed technical arrogance of new oriental generations. There is candor, and material ecstasy, as in the title of a 1963 essay by Le Clézio, L’Extase matérielle. Pictorial ecstasy is unmistakably conveyed through the tiny bits of yellow or red glowing stars of concentric halos, and the specular pleasure of paradoxical surfaces is there to seduce us.— Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim, exhibition curators and directors of the Consortium Museum
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FLAME
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As one of the four classical elements of nature, discovering fire led to many advances in human evolution and civilization. The ancients gathered around fires in caves and held basic tools to create art. The flickering flames ignited part of the artist’s creative process amid their plays of light and shadows, allowing cave paintings to come to life like animated scenes.
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CLOUD
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A few fluffy clouds in a clear, light blue sky, or maybe a little denser. Could we say that light is the primary source of Xie Fan’s paintings? An elemental painting—fire, air, light, water and terracotta—in the fire of pictorial supports.
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GOLDEN SEA
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Xie Fan intentionally applies materials according to their physical properties. For example, the use of gold foil accentuates the interplay of light and shadow, further highlighting the inherent characteristics of the image in series such as Flame and Golden Sea.The layers of brushstrokes and forms float above the pottery plates and become more abstract. The contrast between the image and the underlying surface creates a juxtaposition of the virtual and the real, through which the artist seeks an emotional resonance evoked by the combination of image content and materiality.The seascapes are gilded with soothing reflections by the persistent grazing light of dusk. These seas bear the metallic patina of shimmering daguerreotypes.
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CELESTIAL SIGNS
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As for celestial phenomena, the artist has struck his brush on moons, halos, eclipses perhaps, and suns as well. Framed on their own, they are set alongside sketches of landscapes bathed in the fading light of an ordinary day. A sunset over a flat sea, a moonrise in the darkness.
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The paintings are hung on L-shaped hooks. Small plaques mark the walls and these are no longer the plaques of soft clay that the scribes adorned with hieroglyphs, nor the varnished plaques reminiscent of Burgundian roofs, but rather personal yet universal notes about the sky, the sea, the earth.Primordial paintings, of light and water, of the motionless movement of a cloud in the sun diffracted in our blinded eye.
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Portrait of Xie Fan in his studio. Photo: Song Wenting
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