DEXTER DALWOOD, VAN HANOS, ZHAO GANG

Taking its title from Leon Battista Alberti’s original treatise on line and perspective in art De Pictura (On Painting) from 1450, this exhibition also marks a moment when the poles of flatness and depth shift — as it was in the transition from the Medieval to the Renaissance — and explores the possibilities that exist between two and three dimensions. To ‘depict’ is also to paint or document what is in front of the beholder, an act of looking and absorbing that nevertheless reveals different approaches in these three painters.

Each work in this selection of paintings portrays elements of visible or recognisable reality, but simultaneously combines these physical and painterly sensibilities with interruptions, whether symbolic gestures, innovative mark-making or imagistic collage. Each artist can also be said to embody or refer back to some of the key tenets of (Western) art history – employing the traditions of landscape, still-life and history painting, for example – while also breaking down these hierarchies and creating new literary, cinematic and political fields for experimentation.

In Dexter Dalwood’s practice, the medium of painting is not only examined and celebrated in terms of its history and legacy; he also demonstrates the enduring contemporary relevance of painting as a way of communicating how we experience the world in which we live. In Hard and Lux (both 2018), Dalwood harks back to the origin of post-Impressionist painting by constructing a space for contemplation and solitude in the image of natural phenomena. The act of looking becomes disrupted — the viewers are placed inside a vehicle, looking out through a rain-streaked windshield or a snow-filled backseat window. While in 2059 (knife) (2021), the artist scales this oil on canvas to Jean-Siméon Chardin’s The House of Cards (1737), offering a reflection on the medium today, and stretching his references across time to juxtapose classical still-life motifs with bright, futuristic planets and galaxies.

Van Hanos’ approach to painting is best undefined, forsaking particular modes or methods. Ranging from landscape to portraiture, beyond categorisation as either figuration or abstraction, his work navigates perceptual shifts and thematic rupture. Hanos explores the tremendous range of possibilities within the human mind and experience, and his paintings can be created as meticulous oil renderings of images taken from photographs, with technical precision and photographic tendencies, or as sublime, abstracted amalgamations of past observations and ruminations, replete with internal references to other paintings or past subjects, and layered with meaning. Hanos’ work always beckons the viewer to look closer—as what one first experiences is undoubtedly bound to shift upon continued investigation.

In his work, Zhao Gang delves into the fluidity of individual identities, the clash of cultures, and the intricate interplay of fragmented historical events. In Chicken, Duck and Fish (2023), raw-cuts of meat, poultry and fish collectively serve as an alternative ‘self-portrait’ through which Zhao suggests identity is something ‘eaten’ and reassembled through desire, power, and the mythologies of East and West. Alongside this are a pair of collages drawn from Zhao’s personal resonance to Qingdao, where he first visited in 1978. Taking the style of montage to reflect the artist’s past and present memories of the coastal city in China’s Shandong Province, the fragmented composition also evokes social media grids, inviting viewers to form their own interpretations and narratives.