RUBEN PANG

Pang’s work focuses on automatism, the neurosis and drama of the human condition. Beginning with painting, his practice has also led him to explore the dynamism and spontaneous response of sculpture and the sensitivities and collaborative spirit of music production and performance.

Often, Pang resists binaries in genres such as ‘abstraction’ and ‘figuration’. Working without a preconceived image of the final composition, his approach allows the imagery to surface spontaneously; a “visual syncopation, like searching for a melody in white noise”. Using a combination of oils, alkyds and acrylics he paints, scratches and erases his paintings using brushes, hands, palette knives and sandpaper, revealing layers of colour that reflect projections of his psyche. Working on aluminium panels, its rigidity reflects and captures the nuances of each moment and gesture; its durability allows greater freedom to transform the image as it develops.

Amphibian debuts a new body of work consisting of sculptures and paintings created in Pang’s new studio in Sardinia, Italy. Reflecting on reincarnation in its manifold linear and cyclic forms, the works draw parallel to the idea of an ‘astral mould’ coined by Ian Stevenson, in which physical carryovers, between the living and deceased, are transposed between lives, is congruent to the artist’s experience in art and music: that one receives.

The works in Amphibian nod to an unprocessed and immediate expression of their internal and exterior worlds. Titles reference noise rock bands from the late 70’s to early 90’s, their affinity with poetry and promethean defiance. The ancient Nuragic legacies of the artist’s present surroundings in Sardinia, in their severity and mystery, inspired a series of artworks embracing directness. The plasticity, fidelity and nakedness of unglazed ceramics provide the vehicle through which the artist channels shapes of foreign bodies as if they were his own.