EROTIC PAINTING AVAIABLE FOR SALE AT http://www.artabus.com/joakimpaz

Zhang renders these scenes with a master’s craftsmanship. Hair, flesh, fabric, objects are constructed as self-contained elements, their individual treatment creating a sense of isolation and disunity in the collage effect. His super-pop sheen is exaggerated through painterly veracity: camera blurs, print bleeds, and flash bulb glares are faithfully replicated by brushwork which borders on abstraction. In Series 005 the night vision video effect is perfectly replicated by impassioned smears and smudges, simulating photo realism with intuitive spontaneity.

Behind each of these paintings is a complex story: of destitution, desperation, abuse and entrapment, side effects of economics, migration, and progress; the human costs of commodity culture. By recontextualising the way prostitution is represented and perceived, Zhang’s paintings strive to convey the human condition, with all its indignities and weaknesses, as a duplicitous victimisation of both the oppressed and oppressors.

Zhang Haiying was born 1972 in Shandong, China. Now lives and works in Beijing.

Gerhard’s large paintings tell the story of people who congregate and form a society to experience a specific moment. The visual space the painter creates lies beyond the rational and harmonious worlds, communicating a mysterious, unnerving mood. His figures turn their backs on the viewers, thereby marking the boundary between interior and exterior worlds. In the painting “Falscher Guru” (2006), the presented figures form a semicircle around a covered object in the centre, above which a ghost seems to hover. Gerhard’s visual world moves between figuration and abstraction. On closer observation the presented figures appear distorted or unfocussed, underlining how his figurative motifs also have remnants of abstraction within them.

Gerhard’s skill lies in his ambiguity. His visual world is mysterious and fantastic, thereby irritating and unsettling his viewers. The writer Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as, “the indecisiveness a person feels through knowing only natural laws and facing an event that has a metaphysical appearance.”

Till Gerhard designs the sacred milieu of landscape with painterly mysticism. Bathed in blinding celestial light, his figures are haloed in ‘salvation’ and dwarfed by the majesty of their surrounds. Delicate spills of colour seduce with ethereal glow, while heavy brushwork stands in stark contrast to entrancing flourishes of drips, splashes and smears. Till Gerhard poses his vistas as simultaneously beautiful and foreboding: trees tower with imprisoning threat, and light is conceived as spectral hues, giving the canvases the illusion of radiating from within. The surfaces of Till Gerhard’s paintings are bespeckled with divine aura, infusing his scenes with a supernal ambience. Each beam of light has the effect of floating out of the canvas, embracing the viewer in its contaminated warmth.

Till Gerhard’s paintings explore the conflict between man and nature. Within his scenes is a recurring intrusion of unnatural entity: oil wells and tree forts exude an encroaching anxiety. Gerhard uses their odd presence as a departure into the surreal: a cabin nestled in the woods or a skyline dotted with refineries are both alien and comforting as their surrounding landscapes stretch, float and churn with hallucinatory disorientation. In this conflicted crusade for spiritual revelation and ideological orthodoxy, ghost-like figures mill about lost in their Thoreau-inspired quest for enlightenment.

Diary Windows is a reflexive visual journal. It’s a way of introspection and discovery rising from the need to uncover the hidden world of my inner self. The study of this work started with two questions: Does this diary helps in any way to denounce ourselves and excavate our deep inner self? How sincerely and accurately could a vision or a memory be reproduced?

The pages of the diary are the actual paintings, the canvas, expressing my feelings, my moods and reaction to happenings, before and during the work on this project. I transfer all these through various colours, characters and symbolic objects, giving birth to an inside monologue illustrated in relation to my environment.

The project contains 7 paintings, a sequence of my prominent moods and feelings. These moods create only a sketch of the diary, being completed through it. They are but fractions of ideas that make an impression and then haunt me. I see them as either singular or repeating pictures, imaginary or real.

I use colours with a powerful symbolism, unveiling my inner state. Throughout the project’s works one will find elements and symbols that keep repeating, helping to understand the substance and “story” behind each work.