Xue Ruozhe
Xue Ruozhe
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is honored to present Chinese artist Xue Ruozhe's first solo exhibition in Paris, entitled Xue Ruozhe. The four paintings that compose the work will be displayed sequentially in the space.
Drawing from film scenes and personal experiences, Xue Ruozhe unfolds impressions of Paris on the canvas. The restrained and minimalist colors and the essential umbrellas in rainy weather repeatedly appear in the works. From the backs of figures to the restrained palette, Xue Ruozhe explains "This subtlety and restraint brings out immense power and imaginative space—painting is not just about depicting something, but also about what it evokes."
It's worth noting that the umbrellas in the paintings are not rain gear, nor do they serve to shield from rain. Instead, they are soft light umbrellas used in the photographic sessions by Xue Ruozhe. These umbrellas capture the light source and gently diffuse it throughout the space, simultaneously neutralizing all people and backgrounds. This effect is similar to the light setting in Pièce Unique.
The Umbrellas of HGZ contains both horizontal and vertical time dimensions. The horizontal time is the synchronic time that exists in the materiality of the painting - on the finished painting plane, we can simultaneously see the traces of all the time happening in the brushstrokes and paint layers; this synchronic time, in imagery, is externalized by the juxtaposing two same figures from different time slices in a single painting. The vertical time is realized through the changing display of the only painting at Pièce Unique. This process, together with four paintings, constitutes this work. Here linear time penetrates the synchronic surface of the painting through the process of changing, during which horizontal and vertical time dimensions are interwoven.
The time points at which the figures in the paintings exist are not bound by the constraints of real-world time and space. This means that the time on the left and right sides of the painting, where figures appear simultaneously, may not necessarily be a causal relationship. Additionally, the time in the earliest exhibited work may not precede the time in the last exhibited work. "The sequence formed by these four paintings has no fixed order; they are anticipated being reassembled and regrouped to create new narratives."
An independent publication accompanies this collaboration.
The Artist
Xue Ruozhe was born in Jiangsu Province. After graduating from the Oil Painting Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts, they continued their studies in the Painting Programme of the Royal College of Art, and obtained their master's degree in 2015. They were the winner of the Neville Burston Prize, Gordon Luton Prize for Fine Art, and the Tom Bendheim Prize, also the recipient of China National Scholarship. They were shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2022. Xue currently lives and works in Beijing and Guangzhou.
Using painting as his main artistic approach, Xue's works explore the re-contextualization and re-enchantment of figurative painting in contemporary media ecology, in the rift between painting and imagery, painting and its own history. Underneath the restrained pictorial narrative are Xue's hints about what has yet to be presented or is about to happen. Working with a highly restricted methodology, Xue pushes the psychological density of their paintings to the limit, the reality is then distorted by constant subtraction until the paintings reach a state of suspension and stagnation.
In recent years, their works have focused on exploring the boundary of reality.