Yonder in the universe, are there colors beyond our planet? Very little, if any at all. From space, the sun appears white. Its rays, passing through the atmosphere, give birth to colors. Traveling through Wang's paintings is a kind of fictional chromatic odyssey of space, with visual adventures and surprises guaranteed.
Alexander Oparin, a Russian biochemist, in 1924 proposed the hypothesis of a "primordial soup" that saw the development of the precursors of life in the form of protocells. It seems to me that this bath now constitutes the space of Wang's canvases, where one observes nuclei, some-times with a trail, yellow, red, green, blue alveoli, in the process of uniting or dividing.
Notably in the past, Wang's painting was fractal, explosive, volcanic. The Big Bang seemed to be the very "motif" of his paintings, almost offering a Journey to the Center of the Magma or Twenty Thousand Leagues into the Heart of Lava. The new painting he has been developing since autumn 2023 sees a notable calming, an exit from the furnace, an, beyond the deflagration. Some debris wanders here and there, but a relative serenity now prevails, a breath. It might well be that the end of the COVID-19 pandemic with its oppressive lockdowns is not unrelated to this evolution.
Cosmic latte, such would be the color of the universe according to Baltimore astronomers Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry, who in 2001 claimed to have analyzed the light spectrum from more than 200,000 galaxies. They had previously announced a turquoise blue but then corrected it. It is on this that the colored cells in Wang's paintings evolve. "A small brush is enough to materialize the immensity of the void," noted in the 8th century the Chinese poet, painter, and musician Wang Wei.
Huà is the name for painting in Mandarin. The ideogram presents a kind of window surrounded by four strokes forming a frame. Wang has retained the frame of the canvas mounted on a stretcher but has disintegrated the rigidity of the window to open it onto the expanding universe. He declares that "the most beautiful things are created in a semi-accidental state, as if they were on the verge of failing."
Exactly on January 1, 1714, precisely on the 1st, Leibniz posed the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?". Three centuries later, Wang earnestly strives to answer the questions: "Why is there still painting rather than nothing?" and "Why still paint rather than not?"
Negative space, that's what Wang now seeks in his paintings. To separate, distinguish, seek the gap, take the intervals rather than collide and merge. Perhaps the quest for Lao Tzu's "great appearance without form."
Given the bold initial W, black or white, single or doubled, it floats like a space capsule seeking an orbit in a light beige expanse. A substitute for the ancient seal of the classical Chinese painter?