LONG QUAN

A sober melancholic inwardness prevails most of Long's paintings, standing in a detached neutrality and avoiding any idyllic sentiment. He tends to be extremely rational and rigorous in his painting process; his meticulous attention to form and his careful manipulation of overall structure make it take a long time to produce a painting, manifesting the repetitive layering and demanding labours involved. In the course of his artistic research, the tranquil landscape of the South Pole in which Long Quan immersed himself during his travel in December 2011 was like a revelation for him. Long was struck by an ineffaceable impression of the calmness, solitude and magic of nature's light there. Nature gets a new grandeur in Long's Antarctic landscapes, yet this never involves any menace by the sublimity. The sense of vigour and calmness give the artist's later landscape paintings a new presence, a minimalist, even naiveté, expression. His use of restrained brushstrokes and colours attempt to capture the ephemeral, even elusive state between movement and stillness in nature. In Long's paintings, mountains, rocks, trees, water waves and clouds grow naturally in a slow manner, dissolving the inescapable immediacy that otherwise lives in our relationship to images and delivering a calm dignity in a lucid merging of closeness with remoteness. When these distinct subjects are placed together, a sense of time that mixes history and reality, eternity and chance, and a figure of artist working at ease in his unhurried process of painting, all start to emerge in his composition.