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In Liang Fu’s Latest Work, a Vision of Humanity Touched by Relentless Entropy

The artist’s striking marble-framed paintings situate the human figure in a mutable field of mineral matter, aqueous reflection and symbolic transformation.

A continuous tension between the physicality of matter and the fluid nature of imagination and the subconscious animates the latest body of work by Chinese-born, Paris-based artist Liang Fu. Most recently seen in “Sublunary” at Nicodim, his distorted and warped human faces crystallize, as if caught in a cinematic crop, encased in black marble frames that hold their imaginative symbolic metamorphosis within the natural structure of earth- and time-bound materials. Fu has always embraced the image as unstable territory. There, features, bodies and landscapes appear, but they rarely settle into fixed representation. Instead, they remain in a liminal condition, caught in continuous metamorphosis between the perception of the self and the natural flow of events, within the relentless entropic flux of transformation that affects all things. The process itself, the way Fu lets the image emerge and manifest from the materiality of paint, contributes to this unstable quality. Fu likes to describe his images as beginning from “a drop of water”: watercolor, mineral pigment and oil are left to flow on unprimed canvas, allowing water to carry pigment into the fabric before oil paint adds density, glow and depth. Diffusion and fluid expansion produce shapes that are then developed into figures or fields.

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At the center of his practice is an investigation into the origin of these visual apparitions, suspended between matter and intuition. With his latest works, Fu pushes this confrontation between image-symbol and sculpture as material history even further, making the frames part of the painting rather than leaving them as neutral supports. “I am interested in painting as an object. I created these marble frames........

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